Monday saw the Aoi Matsuri festival here in Kyoto.

"Aoi Matsuri" is 葵祭 -- Aoi means "hollyhock" (a kind of flower), and matsuri means both "source of great traffic congestion" and "festival".

This particular festival, held on May 15th ever year, dates back about 1,000 years, making it the oldest festival still held today. It's a "festival", though, only in the sense of the hoopla surrounding it is festive -- it's really more of an "event".

People dressed in period costumes leave the imperial palace and walk a path to some shrines a few kilometers away. People line the path [...]

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 [...]

This picture doesn't look like much when it's small, but click on it for a larger (1,600 × 1,200) version suitable for what I think is a lovely desktop background. It's from our trip to the Takaragaike Children's Park, mentioned in the previous post.

UPDATE: more cherry-blossom backgrounds from the same trip.

Today we went up to the Takaragaike Children's Park, a wonderful playground with lots of fun things for young kids (those older than elementary-school age are not allowed in unless accompanied by someone in elementary school or younger).

It's in a cooler area of Kyoto than we are (they get a fair amount more snow during the winter, for example; as the blog of Nils, who lives up there, will attest). Being cooler, some of their cherry blossoms are peaking and fading a bit later than ours.

Here's a tree right between the "petals fallen" and "leaves [...]

When a cherry tree starts to give up its petals, it does so in great bursts and flurries. A puff of wind will come along, and every darn petal will spring into the air in a veritable supernova of off-white pink that becomes a localized blizzard as it swirls and dissipates in all directions. Gravity eventually wins, and the ground becomes a thick bed of blossoms sometimes several inches thick.

It's beautiful and mesmerizing, but the most amazing thing about it is that after every petal has been lost to that breeze, the tree remains as heavily laden [...]