While heading to the airport at the end of our trip to Amami (more Amami posts), I noticed this amazing "bridge ramp thingy" (I'm not really sure what to call it) while driving through the city of Naze, off in a direction we weren't heading.

This detailed map (courtesy of Google) shows that it makes two complete revolutions:

I've never quite seen anything like it. It's definitely on my list to check out next time we go to Amami.

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This is the bird's-eye view of the scene shown in the Extremely Blue Light Display post from two weeks ago. The light display is on a hillside in Roppongi Hills (an area of Tokyo, Japan); the photo was taken from a pedestrian walkway that goes over a road fronting the display.

The two side sections were static, while the display in the center section flashed and undulated from time to time.

Fumie and I were in Tokyo two weeks ago for another concert by Kousuke Atari, having won in a drawing one of the 150 pairs of tickets for the [...]

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Our New-Year's trip to the Amami Islands in southern Japan consisted of two nights on the main Amami-Ooshima island, followed by two nights on the much smaller, much more sparsely-populated next island south, Kakeroma-jima (カケロマ島, the island outlined in blue on the second map of my initial post). The land area covers the size of a large city, but it has a population of only about 1,000.

We stayed at Horizon Club, a "pension" (bed and breakfast) near the eastern ferry port. (Horizon Club – ホライゾンクラブ: web site - blog)

The location consists of a small two-room lodge, and three [...]

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As I mentioned yesterday, Kyoto city proper doesn't normally get much snow, but today we had occasion to be in the mountains a bit and Anthony got a few moments to play in some snow that hadn't melted yet.

That's not what these pictures are from. 🙂

I thought to use the occasion to post some pictures from last Spring – April 30th – when we found more than a bit of snow on top of a mountain in Kitafurano (Hokkaido, in northern Japan), where the snow doesn't melt away until July.

The "bad example" referenced in the caption above [...]

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