I'll follow up my post about Restaurant "Kiev" with another Kyoto restaurant of note, Men-Baka ("Noodle Idiot", めん馬鹿一代), which Damien Douxchamps brought me to.

The proprietor saw my big camera and warned that I'd be too dangerous to take photos of my own ramen, so suggested that I take the opportunity to photograph a pair of high-school boys receiving theirs.

The proprietor was a riot. With the dead-serious voice reserved for topics of grave concern, he had the boy with longish hair pick out a colorful hair scrunchie and proceeded to apply it to his front bangs, citing the impending [...]

We recently had a very nice family dinner at the Kiev Russian Restaurant (レストランキエフ) in Kyoto's Gion district.

I'd never had Russian cuisine and so didn't really know what to expect, but it was fantastic. It was a good place to make a first impression of Russian food because the highest quality was evident in every aspect of the meal... from the obviously superb raw ingredients down to the presentation.

At Kiev I had the spring seasonal course dinner "Besner"... course after course of absolutely delightful foods of, again, the highest quality. I couldn't get enough.

I only had my [...]

Yesterday's post ("Photo Shoot at Kyoto’s Haradanien Garden: John and Ai") has inspired me to at least start to try to show the magnificent Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in north-west Kyoto, a few kilometers in the mountains behind the Kinkakuji "Golden Pavilion" Temple. I'd made my first visit last week and from that trip had posted so far only one wigglegram, and then visited a few days ago for the photoshoot with John and Ai, and from that visit also posted some subtle pastel blossoms.

Having entrusted my route to get there to Google Maps on my iPhone, I unknowingly ended [...]

I paid another visit today to the outstanding Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in north-western Kyoto, where the wigglegram ("3D photo") I posted the other day was taken. Today's visit was to do some portraiture with some very photogenic friends, but first a quick post of a small cluster of blossoms (of the millions at the garden) that caught my eye.

To give a sense of context, here's Paul Barr at the same tree...

Continued here...

I made my first visit the other day to the Haradanien Garden (原谷苑) in northwest of Kyoto, a few kilometers into the mountains beyond Kinkakuji ("the Golden Pavilion"). It was, without question, the most amazing place to see blossoms (cherry and others) that I'd ever been, by orders of magnitude. "Stunning", "Awesome", and other overused platitudes don't do it justice, at least when at the peak of season when I visited.

It's been a while since I've done a wigglegram, so even though I've not yet gone over the photos from the visit, I went ahead and grabbed out enough [...]