Continuing with my cherry-blossom pics from last year, here are more from my trip to Daigo Temple last April.

Last year's cherry-blossom season was pretty bad in the sense that the trees didn't all bloom in unison, but each at their own straggly pace. In the picture below, you can see that many of the trees on the right side have yet to bloom.

The area around Daigo Temple was very crowded, yet oddly nice nevertheless. This is in contrast to the ugliness some areas become during cherry-blossom season (the subject of one of my very first blog posts). At [...]

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I mentioned two weeks ago that I'd post some cherry-blossom pictures from last year, as we await this year's season, and so today I begin. To help get me in the mood, I'll start with a picture from my balcony of the trees across the river, and then two from ground level. These were taken on April 7th last year.

I'm not very confident of their color balance -- they seem to have a redish tint to me -- but the sun was heading down, so perhaps it's deserved.

I like these because they show the fluffy, cloud-like nature of [...]

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Yesterday we went to some very old, semi-famous mochi shops in north-west Kyoto, near the Imamiya Shrine. We took the opportunity to walk around the shrine a bit, and in doing so, found a plum (I think) tree just starting to blossom. This was especially surprising because this part of the city is known to be generally colder than the main areas, by a non-trivial amount, so I would have expected it to be later than our area.

In any case, my first blossom-related post is quite a bit earlier this year than last year (April 8th) or the year [...]

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I know it's not the season for cherry blossoms (except in the Southern Hemisphere?), but I'm finally getting around to processing photos from last spring and ran across two blossom photos that make fantastic desktop backgrounds. They perhaps don't look like much in the small versions shown here, but follow the links to the large sizes for gorgeous, delicious desktop-worthy images.

Here's the first one:

Standard: 1600 × 1200        Widescreen:    1280 × 800    -   1440 × 900    -   1680 × 1050    -   1920 × 1200    -   2560 × 1600

The 1,600×1,200 size is appropriate [...]

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Here's a photo which I think captures a lot of Japan:

I took this near Daigo Temple in Yamashina, Kyoto, Japan, after visiting the temple during cherry-blossom season last month.

The big yellow sign says "Ramen" (as in "noodles"), and is for a shop on a major street that you can't otherwise see in the picture. The thing that looks like a cemetery is a cemetery, although there are no bodies, just monuments and likely some ashes.

As a bonus quintessentially Japanese thing, in the very upper right, you can see some futons hanging over [...]

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