And now for something completely different...

"We interrupt our regularly scheduled program to bring you this special feature"




One of my conversation class students, Tamami, often brings her very entertaining cat, Kewpie, to class with her. As you can see from the pictures, she is NOT a small cat! Kewpie likes to hang out while we're having our lesson. She wanders around the room, chases dust bunnies, and jumps on the furniture, making a loud *THUMP* sound (she's one of the noisiest cats I've ever met, which makes her even funnier). Tamami, thanks for bringing Kewpie; maybe someday she'll learn to meow in English!

My latest guests, part three

Two other places we visited in Kyoto are NijoJo (Nijo Castle) and part of the grounds of Kiyomizu Temple, two of the most famous sites in the area.

Nijo Castle was built in the early 1600s during Japan's feudal period. If you want more history, go to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nijo_Castle but I'll quote one short section:

One of the most striking features of Nijō Castle are the "nightingale floors" in the corridors. To protect the occupants from sneak attacks and assassins, the builders constructed the floors of the corridors in such a way as to squeak like birds when anyone walks on them.

After walking through that section and listening to the interesting sounds of the "security system floor", my brother commented that it was amazing workmanship that 400 years later the intricately constructed floor was still functioning exactly as it was designed to.

Surrounding the castle, there is a series of gardens and pathways. Walking around on the grounds and seeing the gardens with the castle in the background was as beautiful as touring the building itself.

Later, we went to Kiyomizu Temple. Unfortunately, we got there just about 15 minutes before the grounds closed, but we saw as much as we could in the short time we had, and then continued looking around from outside the area that had been roped off. We could still see quite a bit of the temple complex from there, and I continued to take pictures.

All of the pictures I'm including in this post were stitched together from multiple photos, which is why they have a long, panorama perspective.

My latest guests, part two

Our first destination after Asakusa in Tokyo was Kyoto. Kyoto is an amazing city-a very interesting combination of very old and very modern. That can be said of many places in Japan, but it's especially apparent in Kyoto.

We arrived by shinkansen (bullet train) at the first example of very modern: the station. It's actually a huge complex of buildings that includes all the train platforms, many restaurants, a mall, and the hotel where we stayed. It's one of those places that's difficult to photograph, but I'll include one picture I took to give a little idea of the inside of the building. Click on the picture to open a larger version, and then zoom in on the upper part-a series (five, I think) of long escalators heads outside of the building.

For an example of the very old aspect of the city, I included a picture of Gion, which is a beautiful district of temples, shops and restaurants, partly along a small canal.

More later...

A month?! (my latest guests, part one)

It's completely beyond me how it's been a month since I last updated (that's probably one of the tritest things you'll read on several thousand blogs all over the world, so enough of that).

My brother (Randy), his wife (Diane), and granddaughter (Paige) visited earlier this month. Everywhere I visited with them was amazing; we had a great time! The list of destinations: Tokyo (including Ueno Park and Asakusa), Kyoto, Nikko, Nagano City, the Sea of Japan near Joetsu, and Hakuba/Happo One (pronounced "hah-poh-oh-nay" -the city where many events were held during the '98 Olympics).

I'll start with just a couple of pictures. The first one is a group picture on top of a hill at Nijo-jo in Kyoto. It's a traditional Japanese castle with a lot of historical and cultural significance. I'll include more pictures of it in another post. The second picture is Diane and Paige in Asakusa. They had a great time touring the district on their rickshaw ride. BTW, our English word rickshaw comes from the Japanese word "jinrikisha" 人力車, 人 jin = human, 力 riki = strength, 車 sha = vehicle, which means "human-powered vehicle". (If you see random letters or squares instead of Japanese characters in the previous sentence, just ignore it; it means your computer isn't set up to read Japanese.)

I'm going to split their visit into several posts.