It took a casual spin around Kyoto last weekend, as the cherry blossoms were starting to come in.

Looking down the street from next to the construction, toward the right, it was a mad house:

So, instead I went up the steep road that goes under the shrine arch seen two photos above.

Not long past the shrine gate, I noticed a huge statue off to the side, and wondered how long it had been there and how I had never noticed it before:

It turns out that it's been there since 1955, and is 24m (80') tall. I guess [...]

This is the final installment about the races introduced earlier in "Watching My First Cycling Road Race", cycling races held on closed streets in Moriyama, Shiga, Japan, about an hour's drive northeast from Kyoto.

After the "youth races" were some "C4" races, races for inexperienced riders (or riders who are experienced but slow). If I were to ever try a race, I'd start in "C4".

This event broke C4 into three different races: "C4H" for men above a certain age (40?), "C4L" for men below the certain age, and "C4W" for women.

As before, I situated myself at a pinch [...]

I went out for a walk with my camera around Gion in yesterday's drizzly dusk, and snapped a few photos. The combination of the hour and the weather makes them a bit "gritty".

In my previous post about a visit to Tokyo last weekend, I mentioned that on the bullet-train ride there I'd passed by a mountain with a temple nestled at the top, and thought it might be nice to investigate the presumably steep road up there. It turns out that it was.

The mountain in question is one of a pair of monadnocks in an area that's otherwise flat as a pancake. Here's the view from Google Earth (with elevation exaggerated for effect):

The taller of the two rises about 350m (1,165') above the surrounding plain, which isn't all that tall, [...]

I made a weekend trip to Tokyo to visit two old friends also visiting Tokyo, brothers Ram and Krish Kulkarni. ("Ram", short for "Ramchandera", rhymes with "prom")

Ram has been my best friend for 30 years, since grad school at the University of New Hampshire. When I then moved to Japan, his twin brother Krish, who was at the time a graduate student at the University of Tokyo, picked me up at the airport.

When I got married almost 20 years ago, Ram was living near Mt. Fuji and came down to Kyoto to be my best man. Fumie and [...]