These signs popped up at intersections in my area of Kyoto a month or so ago. They read:

June 26 (Thursday) 〜 June 27 (Friday) Summit Foreign Ministers' Meeting Due to traffic controls, etc., traffic congestion is expected. Please exercise restraint on driving into Kyoto.

As I mentioned the other day, the G8 Summit meeting of foreign ministers was recently held in Kyoto, which entailed a lot of hubbub.

There was a massive police presence everywhere. I snapped a couple of pictures from my scooter while waiting at red lights. Mostly, there were congregations of police at intersections, looking bored....

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We decided to have a relaxing day, and took drive north an hour and a half to a middle-of-nowhere cafe that Fumie had read about on someone else's blog. It turns out that it's run by a guy who used to be some kinds of architectural-plastics engineer in Osaka, and left it all behind to follow his passion for, oddly enough, stone kilns. That translated into a cafe with fresh pizza on the menu.

The place is called kamo no shirabe (かものしらべ), which means either "melody of the ducks", or "sounds of the river", depending on whether the kamo in [...]

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The other day when Anthony and I did some local hiking that ended up at the back entrance to the Kiyomizu Temple, we got to watch a helicopter take off from the helipad at Shogunzuka, the top of one of Kyoto's "Eastern Mountains".

Besides a helipad and hiking trails, Shogunzuka offers some nice views of Kyoto, but unless you're at the overlook, it feels like you're in the middle of nowhere...

This helipad is just a few minutes' drive from the Kyoto Westin Miyako Hotel, generally considered to be the best hotel in Kyoto. Until the government's Kyoto State Guest [...]

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A neighborhood restaurant featured in an earlier blog post suffered a fire yesterday when the cook took the wrong approach in cleaning the vent ducting above the stove. (Note to other cooks: using fire to burn away accumulated grime in vertical ducting works very well only if you consider the rest of the building to be "accumulated grime".)

The fire explains why helicopters were hovering directly over our place for a while yesterday. (Hovering helicopters are apparently not good news in Japan. The last time helicopters were buzzing around, two weeks ago, it was due to a keeper at the [...]

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Putting five-year-old Anthony down for the night, we were lying in bed and chatting, and out of the blue he says...

" When I get big, if you're not dead, I'll become a spaceship person and go up to the stars and check how much big they are, how much round, how much heavy.... "

I sort of chuckled at the "if you're not dead" part, but didn't comment. Since his great-grandmother died recently, and the ensuing funeral and such, we've had some matter-of-fact talks about death, and he seems to understand things well, and be at peace with the [...]
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