Despite the cold I'm coming down with, I was able to get out for some pictures, and some of the cherry-blossom shots came out okay. I really wish I could place pictures inline in this blog -- the lack of this ability may be the one straw that breaks the Yahoo back, and forces me to move my blog elsewhere. (Note: this post was originally written when my blog was on the now-defunct "Yahoo! 360" social platform.)

Some of today's pictures have made their way into my (now defunct) pretty picture gallery. A full-screen view of this pic or this [...]

Cherry-blossom viewing can be wonderful, but only if you can find a quiet, relatively alone place in which to enjoy it. Otherwise, it's just an ugly spectacle. A few minutes' walk from where I live is Kyoto's "Maruyama Park", famous for its 600 cherry trees, which are appropriately beautiful now that spring has sprung. I went there today, not to see the trees, but rather to see how bad the people were.

During a short drive this morning, it was readily apparent that the cherry blossoms had hit full bloom overnight, as the area offered a dramatically different view than yesterday. I didn't have much time, but did stop to snap the pic above (which certainly does nothing to lend justice to the actual beauty of the scene). It was quite overcast, which mutes the pictures much more than the actual scene.

Unfortunately, I'm coming down with a cold, so slept most of the day. I have to go out in the late afternoon, so will bring my camera along to see [...]

Season changes in Japan tend to arrive like clockwork, and few changes are as well predicted (and highly anticipated) as the blooming of the cherry blossoms ("sakura"). A cherry-blossom tree in full bloom is truly more than the sum of its parts, presenting an almost unearthly, indescribable beauty that no photograph can capture (although that doesn't stop hordes of both amateur and professional photographers from trying, myself included.)

Thus, it was with doubtless disappointment that the throngs of tourists that descend upon Kyoto this past weekend (many, certainly, from all over Japan, with tours scheduled long in advance) were treated [...]

While waiting the other day at an intersection I traverse often (under a huge maze of overpasses), it suddenly struck me that the name of the intersection might look funny to an English- (but not Japanese-) speaker: Ouchi. It's pronounced "oh-ooh-chi", and sounds like the fictitious Irish name O'Coochie without the 'k' sound.

It's just a name, but for what it's worth, the component characters mean "big" and "inner".