Or, You can get there from here... but not this way.

While waiting for the bus to arrive on the dizzily morning last week that Anthony rode the bus to school all by himself, I snapped this picture of a fence across the street, along the park-like grounds of the municipal museum of art. I think it's pretty.

(Be sure to see the large version for the full effect... it's sort of arresting, but in a nice way).

Doing an image proximity search on the area beyond the fence yields a lot of results from my blog over the years...

This post continues from my previous post, "Cherry Blossoms in the Rain at the Heian Shrine". Even more so than in that post, a lot of the pictures this time have a sort of distinct (distinctly annoying?) feel, with multiple planes of focus (or the lack there of).

Also, as with some of the photos in last month's "Kyoto 2009 Cherry-Blossom Preview", some this time have had a touch of Lightroom's "negative clarity", which I apparently am enamored with. The shot above, of course, has had a lot of negative clarity applied, to give it a glowing pastel feel. I [...]

Last Tuesday, after Anthony went to school on the bus all by himself, I thought I'd take advantage of the rainy weekday morning (no crowds!) to check out the cherry blossoms in the garden of the Heian Shrine. The most common variety of cherry blossom around here (the pure white yoshino) are almost completely gone, but the Heian Shrine's justly famous garden is full of other varieties that were still pretty much at full bloom.

By the time I started over (the shrine didn't open for an hour and a half after Anthony had gone), the rain had started up [...]

On our way back from our short day trip to Awaji Island last week (about which I posted lotsa' flower pictures here and here), we stopped by the highway rest stop just south of the big Akashi-Straights bridge. I wrote about the rest stop before in Heavy Lifting: Supporting the Longest Suspension Bridge in the World.

This time it was dark, and the Ferris wheel ("the largest at a highway rest stop in Japan! if not the world!") was lit up with pure green floodlights that made a dizzying sight...

The "dizzying" came not from its height (it's not really [...]

My best friend from college, Ram Kulkarni, was in Japan for business, and so stopped by to visit in Kyoto this evening. I saw him previously about a year ago in Tokyo, and prior to that was likely about 11 years ago when he was Best Man at my wedding.

Last time he'd been working at a think tank as an advisor to a former prime minister in Finland, but now he has a much more demanding boss: he's started his own company in Bangalore, India.

I brought him up to the real Shogunzuka Overlook, which I actually entered for [...]