My sister, Jane, and her friend, Nancy, visited me a few weeks ago, and we had an amazing time! This is going to be my short "these pictures don't really fit in anywhere else" post. I'll start a more detailed explanation of our adventures in the next post, but this will at least get us started.The picture of Jane and Nancy together is in Hachimanyama park in Utsunomiya. (Check back in my posts from a few months ago for more information.) There's a long suspension bridge that crosses a small ravine, and at each end there are statues of, uh..., well..., I think they are babies made of acorns. Or acorn forest spirits. Or acorn tree dryad beings, or acorn aliens. Well,
they're kind of strange, whatever they are, so we took a picture!The picture with the lily is outside the temple near the Oya Kannon that I have mentioned in other posts. I might post pics of our visit there later. I just thought it was an interesting picture with cool lighting.
The picture of Jane with the statue is the infamous gyoza statue outside of Utsunomiya Station. It's just SO odd, it makes me laugh every time I see it (in a good way!). It was inspired in part by Botticelli's "The Birth Of Venus", but instead of Venus emerging from a seashell on the shore, it's an abstract, faceless woman emerging from a Chinese dumpling on a stone surfboard. Makes perfect sense, right?
The last picture is in Nagoya. We saw this building close to the hotel we were staying in. I thought the design was odd, and Jane said it looked like something out of "Buck Rogers". I decided it was the church of the ethereal, transcendental egg. Or something like that. (Actually, when we thought about it later, we realized it was probably a wedding chapel. That's very common here for people to get married in a church-ish looking place that's not really a church.)
