I've got a cold (yuck), so I'm dipping into my archive of "blog about someday" pics for some low-hanging easy-to-post fruit.

This lock was on the door of a bell tower deep in the mountains on the rear grounds of the Nanzen Temple (Kyoto, Japan). It took it last summer while walking around with friends KFC and Verena while they were in town. It was the same trip where Anthony inspected a butterfly.

As I mentioned on my Amami Islands post, it was really really really windy for the first few days of our New-Year's visit to Amami Island (奄美大島) in the East China Sea in the far south of Japan. The airport is near the Kasari-cho area (the north-east part of the island) where Fumie's grandmother lived until a teenager, and in exploring that area after we arrived, we found ourselves at a deserted lighthouse at the most northern tip of the island.

I don't suppose that the picture above really shows the whipping wind very well, but it was truly impressive. [...]

We took a short trip over the New Year holiday to the Amami Islands of southern Japan, in the East China Sea about halfway between Okinawa and the Japanese mainland.

The map below shows our flight back, from the northern part of the main Amami island (circled in green) to Osaka (circled in blue). Mentally, Amami feels much further away than Hokkaido (circled in Red) where we visited last May, even though the latter is indeed farther away.

When we went to Hokkaido, we took an 18-hour ferry trip, but were almost always within sight of land. The flight back [...]

We just back from a five-day trip to Amami-Ooshima (an island in the south of Japan). While waiting for 858 photos I took to process, I thought I'd post our 2007 Christmas / 2008 New Year's card (nengajou – 年賀状). It features a photo we took with a tripod here in Kyoto, and the family picture that Anthony was commissioned to draw.

For reference, here is a link to last year's and the year before's, and a short introduction to Japanese New Year's Cards that I wrote a couple of years ago.

Winter is fairly blah in Kyoto, color/nature-wise. Kyoto is glorious in autumn and glorious during cherry-blossom season, hellatiously hot and humid in summer, and blah in winter. But one thing it has in winter are red berries of all sorts.

While walking back from the shrine-closing ceremony in mid-November, I noticed some berries growing wild by a small river...

Since then, I've started to see them all over, whether in small plants, on shrubs, or in trees. Here's an old house fronting the river, with large bushes of red berries flanking on either side....

Now that I think about it, [...]