Merry Christmas! Happy Birthday Jesus!

Merry Christmas!
I managed to get a picture of Santa and Rudolph on my recent trip to the North Pole. (If you look at Santa carefully, he might look a little familiar . . . )

I leave for my vacation in the States tomorrow --I'll see some of you soon!

Christmas plans and Utsunomiya Central Park

Just a quick note--many of you have already heard my vacation schedule, but probably not everyone, so here it is:
--arriving in Oregon December 24th; staying with my family in Eugene/Springfield
--traveling to Portland on December 29th; staying with ???? (anybody want to host me?)
--traveling to California on January 2nd; staying with family in San Jose
--returning to Japan on January 8th

The three pictures are from a walk I took a few weeks ago in Utsunomiya's Central Park. The leaves were just starting to change color at that point. Fall seems to come later here than in Oregon, but when the weather changed, it cooled off very quickly. The days now are in the mid 50s, mostly sunny, and the nights are quite cold.

Guests part seven

Our last day in Nagano we spent the morning at Zenko-ji Temple. It is very important both to the culture and history of Japan, and is a very impressive site. Because of the large number of buildings in a fairly small area, it was difficult to take any pictures that show the scale of the grounds. The first picture, taken from one of the main temples with other buildings in the background, is as close as I could get to showing the size of the site. If you want more information, Wikipedia has a good entry on Zenko-ji.




Besides all the umbrellas (the rain wasn't really that bad-by Oregon standards it was just sprinkling), in the second picture you can see the incense burner where people sometimes stand in the smoke and rub it on themselves in hope of a blessing.




In the final picture, you can see priests performing a ceremony. It was very fascinating to watch, but it reminded me of the difference between religion -- rituals that try to reach god(s) -- and faith -- relationship with the God who reaches to us.




That's my (relatively) short summary of our travels; Randy, Diane, and Paige, thanks again for a fantastic experience together!

Guests part six

On the day we visited Happo-One, we also traveled to the Sea of Japan/East Sea. The closest large city in the area we visited is called Joetsu, if you want to check a map.



It was a beautiful, clear, warm day, and as you can see in the picture, Diane and Paige enjoyed the warm water. It wasn't quite "Hawaii-warm", but I was surprised at how nice the water was, considering it was October.

Guests part five: Nagano and Hakuba

I've got to get my posts from the end of the summer done so I can catch up to fall before winter starts! . . . so here's the next part:

Continuing from last time; our last big trip before my brother and his family went home was Nagano, Hakuba, and Happo-One (pronounced "hah-poh-oh-nay") which hosted the Winter Olympics in 1998.

The city of Nagano is not extremely large (the population is about 400 thousand) but it seems to have a lot of personality. My included picture of the area near our hotel doesn't really do it justice; it was fun to walk around that neighborhood and get a feel for the character of the city. We had a fantastic dinner in a wonderful restaurant there that had traditional "horigotatsu" seating (seating arrangements on Japanese tatami floors where there are sunken areas beneath the dining tables for comfortable leg room).

Hakuba and Happo-One are in the mountains near Nagano. The architecture looked like pictures of Switzerland that I've seen--it was truly a beautiful place. We rode the gondola part of the way up the mountain, and the third picture I included was taken there.

Last week I went back to Hakuba with my school for a conference, but that will have to be in a different post.