The little path by the river next to my place is not heavily traveled, although foot traffic explodes in this whole area during cherry-blossom season, and so these days a fair number of people walk by. In particular, it doesn't hurt that some the cherry trees lining the river are already half in bloom -- the ones lining the canal will be much nicer, but they haven't yet come in. (Here's an old photo of the canal lined with cherry trees, where the canal runs in front of our place.)

Because I'm always behind the camera, I don't see how [...]

The dinner party I went to yesterday was right in the middle of Gion, Kyoto's traditional area for maiko and geisha.

We ate at a simple okonomiyaki restaurant on the Shirakawa river (the river that runs next to my place, but a kilometer downstream), just off a street whose name translates, literally, to "Cherry-Blossom-Viewing Lane". The immediate area has a lot of traditional architecture, cobblestone streets, and the river overhung with cherry trees just starting to blossom, so you can imagine the photographic potential.

So can everyone else, which is why I was surprised that it wasn't super [...]

At a small dinner gathering today with some friends from Anthony's preschool, I was shocked to see little May, the younger sister of one of Anthony's classmates, deftly use chopsticks as if she'd been doing so all her life.

I was pleased as could be when Anthony could use chopsticks when he was three, but this little girl just turned two earlier this month. She just grabbed her daddy's chopsticks (adult-sized, no less) and went to town on a wiener without the slightest hint of difficulty. I grabbed my camera, asked her to show me, and I got the picture [...]

Cleaning up around the house today, I came across the menu for a pizza chain. I thought I'd share some of the entries, which are quite typical of pizza in Japan.

They have three "series" of pizza: the Italiana Series boasts "cheese stacked to the top of your ears," the Quarter Series has pizzas with four different combination of toppings (one combo per quarter pizza), and the Long Seller Series are the traditional standbys.

In this post, I'll feature one from each series...

The first pizza in the Italiana Series has four combos like a Quarter-Series pizza, and [...]

Continuing with my cherry-blossom pics from last year, here are more from my trip to Daigo Temple last April.

Last year's cherry-blossom season was pretty bad in the sense that the trees didn't all bloom in unison, but each at their own straggly pace. In the picture below, you can see that many of the trees on the right side have yet to bloom.

The area around Daigo Temple was very crowded, yet oddly nice nevertheless. This is in contrast to the ugliness some areas become during cherry-blossom season (the subject of one of my very first blog posts). At [...]