NOTE: Images with an icon next to them have been artificially shrunk to better fit your screen; click the icon to restore them, in place, to their regular size. Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ 70 mm — 1/250 sec, f/2.8, ISO 6400 — full exif Before Nikon D700 + Nikkor 24-70mm f/2.8 @ […]
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I like Amazon.com, and use both its US and Japan sites all the time, but I've never seen such wasteful packaging as I did with an order that recently arrived via forklift from Amazon Japan. The six boxes in the lower part of the stack are fairly spacious, but five of them each contain exactly one sliver-thin 15" × 15" LEGO® Base Plate, a couple of crumpled pieces of paper as ineffective padding, and a lot of air...

It's fantastically ridiculous. The entire order, shown below, could have easily fit into any two of the boxes..

Heck, the empty boxes, [...]

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I ended my previous post, Kyoto Mountain Restaurant "Yama no Ie Hasegawa", commenting that I wanted to take Fumie to the middle-of-nowhere restaurant I'd visited the other day with Paul Barr, after having seen it mentioned on a friend's blog. I did that today, visiting for lunch with Fumie and Anthony.

We sat out on the enclosed-for-the-winter porch.

After our delicious lunch, I got out my camera, Fumie had a cup of coffee, and Anthony clowned around...

When a cat started meowing loudly just outside the porch, Anthony went over and meowed back. Back and forth they had a conversation....

[...]
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In my previous post about the carpet of yellow at the Iwato Ochiba Shrine in the mountains of north-west Kyoto, I mentioned that my inspiration for venturing out to see the shrine was a blog post by Britto about his bicycle ride there. He also mentions stopping for a bite to eat at the middle-of-nowhere restaurant Yama no Ie Hasegawa (山の家　はせがわ -- "Mountain House Hasegawa", with "Hasegawa" being the family name of the proprietor). As it so happened, on my trip out to the shrine, Paul and I were getting hungry about the time we came upon the restaurant's sign, [...]

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Last week, Kyoto friend Britto posted on his blog about a couple of recent bicycle trips he'd recently taken, including one to a shrine in the mountains north of Kyoto that sounded so appealing that I went there myself the next day (though I went by motorbike). Paul Barr is still in town, so I invited him along; that's him in the photos above.

It was a long and steep enough trip on the scooter... mad props to Britto for doing it on a bicycle!

In the shrine's name (岩戸落葉神社; iwato ochiba jinja), iwato means "rock above a cave entrance", [...]

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