This is the season for the Gion Matsuri festival, and tonight was the first of three evenings when a lot of streets around Shijo Karasuma are closed off for pedestrian traffic. The streets fill with folks (and photographers) enjoying a festive atmosphere..

I was shocked to see the photo above when I came home and checked out my pictures, because it makes it look much more crowded than it actually was. I hear that tomorrow and the next evening will be so crowded that it'll be difficult to move, but this evening was nothing but pleasant.

People come out for [...]

Anthony's cousin Nao (七音), a little healthy girl, was born on Monday to his Aunt Namiko and Uncle Shogo (Uncle Shogo being Anthony's mommy's brother), about nine months nineteen hours after they exchanged vows. All are doing well.

Anthony felt that she was heavy, because, it turns out, that he felt the weight of responsibility in holding someone so tiny. As for me, used to lugging around an eight year old, Nao felt about as heavy as a helium-filled balloon.

In our second drive through the rural mountains of Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) that I most recently wrote about the other day in "Pleasant Little Village in Uji, Part 2", after leaving that village we wound our way north for half an hour (for what turned out to be only a mile and a half as the crow flies!) and had to stop when we came across some extremely vivid flowers at the end of someone's driveway.

I didn't realize it until I went to check the photo times between the village and these flowers, to see how long [...]

In "Pleasant Little Village in Uji" last month, I showed photos from the edge of a small remote village in Uji City (Kyoto Prefecture, Japan) of maybe a dozen houses scattered about. Today's photos are from the other edge of the village...

Considering the similar shots in "Exquisite Beauty Growing Like a Weed by the Side of the Road" and "Scenes From Rural Japan: Mountain Village in Uji City" (both from a trip the week prior to the one that produced today's photos), I'm probably overdoing these a bit, but I like them and it's my blog, so here we [...]

Yesterday I posted a few pictures in Part 1 on a particularly photogenic ravine first seen in last week's "Scenes From Mountain Roads in Northern Kyoto".

This post is a bunch more, mostly without comment.

First, again, here is the view from the road...

I climbed up into that for the rest of the pictures.

The trees aren't actually all that tall... maybe 25-30m (~7 or 8 stories tall), but they're plenty tall enough to awe.

This next one isn't much in the thumbnail version, but it's quite something else when viewed full screen...

While heading back down, I came [...]