文書は英語ですが、写真は共通
(though I'm taking a break from blogging for a while)
Archive for the 'Japan' CategoryPosts relating to Japan and things Japanese I'll write about my new camera, a Nikon D200, in the near future (here's a preview: it rocks!), but here's a pic I took during my trip to Yodobashi Camera, one of the largest camera stores in Japan (total space over its six floors must be about the same as a typical Wal Mart or Home Depot) Notice a prevailing theme? 🙂 I'd gone to pick up a few things, such as a camera bag and a tripod. For bags, a friend had strongly recommended the Tamrac Velocity 7, but I found it not at [...] 
View full post » Niigata (新潟) is an area of Japan that's gotten a lot of snow -- more than 12 feet (3.8 meters) so far this year. Yesterday on the news I saw a video of a tiny car driving down the street, with accumulated snow still on its roof. The snow was at least as tall above the top of the car as the car itself was tall above the road (about four and a half feet each, I'd guess). Someone had chiseled this thing out of a snowbank, cleared the snow from the hood and windows, and left all the [...] 
View full post » Continuing with my new camera posts... So, yesterday I went down to the Joshin Denki electric shop with Anthony, to actually look at and handle the Nikon D200 camera I'd pretty much decided on. Although the shop we went to was the closest of the various branches in Kyoto, it doesn't have parking so it's quite inconvenient unless I go by bike (which I didn't want to do at night, with Anthony, in the cold). I'd called around other Joshins in Kyoto to see if they had the D200 on display, but only this one had. So, [...] 
View full post » Now that the Japanese New-Year cards have been delivered (they're delivered en masse on New Year's morning), I can show the cards we sent this year: Our Christmas 2005 Card For friends/family outside of Japan Our New Year 2006 Card For friends/family within JapanThey were actually both exactly the same size, but our address info took differing amounts near the bottom, and they got lopped off for this post. The New Year card has a dog in the upper corner (2006 is the year of the dog), and the spinning top under "Happy" is a [...] 
View full post » We seem to have started a new family Christmas Eve tradition..... First, we enjoyed the free mini concert that the Kyoto Hotel Okura puts on in their nicely-decorated lobby each Christmas Eve. We enjoyed it last year as well, when they had a men's choir. This year they featured the Tokyo Horn Spieler horn quintette. They started out with a huge alphorn (looks like a 20-foot-long tobacco pipe originally used to communicate long distances in the Alps), then moved on to a pair of natural horns (like French Horns, without keys or valves -- basically, just an [...] 
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