While driving around on our trip to Furano, Hokkaido during Golden Week, we came across the smallest train station I've ever seen. Heck, I've seen larger bus stops.

It was at the junction of Nowhere and Boondocks, near where a road crossed the train tracks. Here's the view one direction from the road....

And the view the other direction....

On the way to the Nanzen Temple the other day (as seen in this post and in this post), we stopped by the location where I made the vine on bamboo fence shots last fall. I was pleasantly surprised to find that the same vine had come back to life, so decided to take some more pictures.

In preparation, wanting to be able to set the proper color balance later, I pulled a white business card I happened to have from my pocket and asked Anthony to hold it such that it was illuminated by the same light as the [...]

I'd like to share a few more shots from yesterday's impromptu visit to Nanzenji (南禅寺 the Nanzen Temple, Kyoto Japan). The path above seems to lead to some part of the temple complex, but I've never seen anyone on it. I like the view, and think it might make a nice desktop background, so have provided links to both widescreen and standard-format versions.

If incense smoke wafts over your head, you'll become smarter..... or so it is said.

After the "Looking for Goodies" shot from yesterday's post, Anthony came running to me with the candy he'd procured. I wasn't able [...]

Fumie and I had a ningen dokku (人間ドック) medical checkup today. It's like an elaborate physical, including X-rays, electrocardiographs, etc. The low point for me was a camera down the throat to check the lining of the stomach (high-resolution video coming soon! :-)). Fumie had an MRI as well, which she also didn't care for.

The "ningen" in the title means "human," but I couldn't find anyone who knew the stand-alone meaning or origin of "dokku." Looking it up now, I see that it's from the English "dock," and thus the imagery of a full checkup like this is comparable [...]
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This morning we took a short bike ride to Kyoto's Nanzen Temple (南禅寺), one of the more famous temples in Japan. I was there just the other day with some friends, and it's been featured in my blog before (such as this Photography of Katsunori Shimada, a few shots from a visit two years ago, and another shot or two by Shimada-san). It's one of those things that's so close that we sort of take it for granted, so most photography I do there still awaits processing. But I liked today images especially, so they jump to the head of [...]