On our short trip to Imabari a couple of months ago, after leaving the oddly-interesting Towel Museum we made our way back to Kyoto via the Great Seto Bridge, the collective name for a bunch of large double-decker (cars on top, trains below) bridges that span about six miles of the Seto Inland Sea between Shikoku and Honshu, the smallest and largest of the four islands that make up the bulk of Japan.

The route we took on the outward leg of the trip crossed to Shikoku via the much longer Shimanami Kaido, hopscotching over a bunch of fairly large [...]

Well, it's not quite Mt. Everest, and not even as high as the mountain we visited in Ehime Prefecture last month, but the view made it feel like it was. Pierre Nadeau, the Japanese swordsmith I visited earlier this month, stopped off to show us this view on the way to lunch.

My imperfect Japanese can sometimes make for comical situations. I heard that we were going for lunch and that I should follow in my car. It was quite a long drive, but I wasn't surprised because someone had said we were going to "Oishiikougen", which I understood as, [...]

A scant fifteen seconds from the front door of Pierre Nadeau's Swordsmith deep in the rural mountains of Japan's Wakayama Prefecture is a sweeping view of "Aragishima" (commonly written あらぎ島, but sometimes 蘭島), a set of terraced rice paddies shaved from a hill almost completely encompased by the sweep of an almost-full-circle river bend.

The paddies weren't in their most photogenic state when I visited earlier this month, and the weather/lighting situation while I was there didn't help. These photos were taken over the course of a couple of days, so the lighting among them is all over the map. [...]

Having finished up yesterday with my last post on the oddly-interesting Towel Museum in Imabari, Japan, I thought I'd post one more "What am I?" quiz from there, adding to the last month's quiz from there.

So, what's today's photo?

(The answer is noted in the comments below; the story of our Imabari trip is continued here.)

After picking up my new lens in Roppongi earlier this month, I thought I'd better nourish up before walking around for some big-lens street photography, and had the good fortune to walk into Le Grand Soir. The style was modern urban sophisticated (the chef used to work in Paris), but without any pretense or ostentation.

I had a lightly seasoned breaded chicken leg, and it was without question, by far... utterly in a class by itself... the best piece of chicken I have ever had. Anywhere. (Sorry Mom.)

Really, with food this good, there's no way to calculate "value", but [...]