I lost the last two days of my life to a cold that started coming on while writing the previous post. Starting to feel better today, a light and airy subject like flowers helps to brighten the mood.

I have the opposite of a green thumb... I kill every plant I touch, it seems, regardless of whether it's potted or vased. When I get cut flowers from the florist (e.g. for Mother's Day, etc.) I sometimes get that expensive liquid you add to the vase water that's supposed to extend the life of the flowers, but it has never seemed [...]

I took another walk in Fushimi yesterday (a south-east area of Kyoto), similar to that of my previous post ("A Few Over-Process Under-Thought Photos From Lunch"), but with nice weather. Red and orange seemed to be a theme.

For the most part, cherry trees here in Japan don't bear fruit in a meaningful way (normally just small bitter fruits that are usually unnoticeable to begin with), but at the start of yesterday's walk I came across a real fruit-bearing cherry tree in front of someone's house, with a note "Enjoy them once they become red"...

Sadly, they were not red, [...]

First there was the walk to lunch ("On The Way To Lunch: Eastern-Kyoto Stroll"), then lunch ("Delicious Yuba Lunch at Junsei"), and now the walk home...

We came across an ultra-fluffy yaezakura cherry that comes out late (a variety seen five years ago on my blog in "10 Gallons of Blossoms on a 5-Gallon Branch"). It seemed all the more fluffy set off by the new-growth green of the trees around it...

It was a pleasant day in a pleasant area...

One property we came by had a bunch of trees that seemed to glow in an unearthly way [...]

The other day in "On The Way To Lunch: Eastern-Kyoto Stroll" I ended with a few shots of the girls above taking advantage of a photogenic location, made more so for everyone else by their presence.

I was heading to the Kiyomizu branch of the most excellent Junsei Tofu Restaurant to have lunch with Paul Barr. The branch is so named because it's near the front gate of the Kiyomizu Temple, in an area that usually packed with tourists, so the quiet elegance of the restaurant is a welcome relief from the crowds. I learned of it from a friend [...]

I had an amazing outing yesterday with Paul Barr and Nicolas Joannin, to a far-off temple in the mountains of north-west Kyoto. On the way home, we stopped in the "Mountain House" restaurant Yama no Ie Hasegawa (山の家はせがわ) that I wrote about a couple of years ago (here and here). Upon pulling in, we were immediately drawn to a row of blossoming trees that had quite a different vibe from cherry or plum. It turns out that they were peach.

They were on an embankment, so we could view them from above, below, and on the side... it was a [...]