I've recently been taking a fancy to yakitori (grilled skewered chicken), and especially the crunchy nankotsu variety.

"Torikizoku" is a chain of yakitori restaurants whose thing is that everything on the menu is 280 yen (plus tax, making each item currently about US$2.60), so the menu is just a list of items.

Any drink is "one item", and this includes a normal serving of Suntory Premium Malts beer (seen on my blog in "A Visit to Suntory’s Kyoto Beer Brewery"), making the price comparable to the cost of a can in a convenience store, instead of the about-double price a [...]

This post picks up from part one on my two-year-cycleversary ride though the snowy mountains north of Kyoto. I'd suffered a spell of frozen fingers, but was now mostly warm again and in good spirits.

The area is fantastically beautiful in the snow.

As I mentioned in Part One, riding through the semi-compact snow with thin (28mm) road-bike tires often felt like my tires had to work like ice breakers, shoving through a semi-frozen slushiness of evil-Goldilocks consistency (it's not strong enough to support the weight of the bike, nor weak enough to be easily shoved out of the way).

I started cycling two years ago when I naïvely went on this ride, joining only because I had no clue about what was intended. We ended up doing 55km (34 miles), which was probably 10× what I had ever ridden before. I was invigorated to have done so easily what I would have imagined would be impossible, so I decided to set out on a "real" ride, a longer, hillier one done with intention.

So a week later, on Feb 7 2015, I did another ride -- what I now consider my first "real" bicycle ride -- a 91km (57mi) [...]

Today was the Setsubun festival at the Heian Shrine (and many shrines around Japan). I've written about the overall festival earlier, such as "Setsubun and Mamemaki: Driving out the Demons" nine years ago, and "Attack (and Repulsion) of the Evil Spirits" five years ago.

Today I went only to watch the final bonfire event. I explain it in some detail in "Intense Burn: Shinto Rite at the Heian Shrine" from nine years ago, and so like this post from five years ago, this time are just some photos.

I wandered over to the shrine about half an hour before the [...]

Two weeks ago we had a fair bit of snow in Kyoto (a rarity, since many years we have none), so that probably meant that the mountains in the north (which get lots of snow) were impassable, so I took a bicycle ride south-west towards Kobe. I still found snow.

Here's the 100km ride:

The first climb was the eastern Yanagidani climb, which I had descended before but never ridden up. I took my time, stopping for photos like the above when I ascended above the snow line, and at one point to help a group of elderly hikers find [...]