On the first day of our mini late-April trip to Awaji Island a few hours' drive south of Kyoto, we saw the sunset from a beach on the south-west part of the island, as I posted the following day.

I had my recently-acquired Sigma "Bigma" 50-500mm superzoom, and had fun playing with its long reach.

Most beaches I've seen in Japan are full of trash, either left behind by a throng of uncaring visitors, or blown in from the ocean over the years and left to collect. This one was much better than most -- perhaps a local association cleans [...]

Yesterday was our twelfth wedding anniversary, so I took Fumie out for lunch.

I'd planned to take her to a particular restaurant I knew, until at almost the last moment I realized that they were closed (doh!), so I had to scramble for a new idea. I checked my go-to resource for restaurant info (Deep Kyoto's post archives) and quickly found one that looked perfect, a review of a cafe named "Quarirengué". I have no idea how to pronounce it, but it looked nice.

They're mostly open for cakes and coffee, but we were hungry so partook of the two [...]

The hotel that I recently wrote about (at which we stayed during our recent mini trip to Awaji Island a couple of hours south of Kyoto), Westin Awaji Island, is part of a conference center and park called the "Awaji Yumebutai" (淡路夢舞台;, "Stage of Dreams", English home page), a complex array of buildings and visuallly-interesting areas built on the side of a mountain that had been half taken away in the early 90s for use as sea-fill during construction of the man-made islands that are now Kansai International Airport.

One of the "visually-interesting areas" is known as the "100-level garden" [...]

I've mentioned that we made a short trip to Awaji Island at the end of last month. It's a short two-and-a-half hours by car south of Kyoto; after passing over the longest suspension bridge in the world and getting off at the exit near the rest-stop Ferris wheel, a few kilometers further along the coast and we arrived at The Westin Awaji Island hotel.

Because Anthony's school gets off a few days earlier than most prior to the start of the Golden Week holidays, we were actually traveling opposite of peak time, so we had almost no traffic. Yet, despite [...]

I'm always fascinated at how one can lie with the camera, taking advantage of the fact that as far as the photo is concerned, if it's out of frame, it doesn't exist. I do it all the time, excluding utility wires, ugly urban visual blight, etc., when I'm out and about with the camera.

At the "Yabusame" mounted archery rite at the Shimogamo Shrine in Kyoto, I was amazed, as I often am in these "oasis of nature within the city" situations, that even though we were in Kyoto city proper, the nature was engulfing. Kyoto has a lot of [...]