Zak invited me to a small musical gathering he was part of this evening, at an old Kyoto machiya house that's been turned into a French cafe, Les Trois Maisons. A common friend had recognized their individual talents, and thought it'd make for an interesting experience to put them together.

The intimate ambiance was supurb for live music....

It was less suited to photography, which is perhaps fine because I wanted to enjoy the music, but I did take a few shots, with the low light pushing the limits of the camera and its user.

That shot of Zak (taken [...]

Earlier in the month I posted about our trip to the Toganojaya Restaurant in the mountains of north-west Kyoto. After having lunch and a bit of play at the river below it, we continued on a drive deep into the mountains. We drove for hours, but never left Kyoto City proper.

At one point we saw a paraglider descending, so we cut off the main road, through a small settlement, and found the landing spot just as one was coming in. We could see a half dozen other paragliders in the air, so stuck around to watch for a while...

After Nils Ferry showed me Rengeji Temple the other day, we continued on my scooter up into the mountains north of Kyoto, toward Kibune and Kurama. I'd made the trip by car many times, but never by scooter, so I took the opportunity to check out a cool-looking location I'd only briefly glimpsed before as the car went past.

It turns out that it's a garden, with the big stone to the left of the steps giving its name as Hakuryuuen (白龍園).

Unfortunately, it's a private garden not normally open to the public, so I was limited to admiring what [...]

I got together with long-time Kyoto resident Nils Ferry for the first time in more than a year, for lunch and a photo-walk. He introduced me to an out-of-the-way temple he likes, Rengeji (蓮華寺), not far from the river where Anthony and his son Greg played the last time I saw Nils, last summer.

(Nils was the premier Kyoto photo-blogger prior to becoming a daddy. Now that Greg is in kindergarten, he's thinking of getting back into it...)

The temple is small, but pretty, and very quiet. During the two hours we were relaxing there, just one other pair of [...]

The picture above is not that special, but for some reason really grows on me as a desktop background. When viewed big, there's just something about it that I like, giving my current desktop-background image a run for its money.

It was the view just outside the window at the Toganojaya Restaurant in the north-west mountains of Kyoto, Japan, which we visited this past weekend (and was the subject of the four previous posts: one, two, three, and four). In this post are a few final pictures from that visit...

The same branch that heads out of frame in the [...]