Oideyasu! Please take off your shoes.

We hopped on the Eizan train to Yase-Hiezan-guchi station (just about 8 minutes from home) after school and met Anthony and his daddy Jeffrey for a dip in the river.

UPDATE (JULY 23): Oh, man, our little swimming’ spot was featured on the news last night, at the start of summer vacation! It’s gonna be crowded beginning today, for sure.

Greg and I recently went camping together for the first time. We pitche dour tent at the top of a little valley on the mountainside up above Manshu-in temple. Behind those trees is a  waterfall.

At Sanjo bridge a few days ago I ran into an old coworker and her family visiting from the U.S.

Greg went for a bike ride in his LSU Tigers shirt that we got on our recent trip to Louisiana, and I realized his bike and helmet are well coordinated, even if you can’t see the menacing tiger on the front of the shirt.

Highlights from last year. Go to the top page of this site for video.

A short video of a suikinkutsu, an audio feature of some Japanese gardens that adds a soothing soundscape to the visual calm. A Suikinkutsu is a very large, inverted clay pot buried under a tsukubai water laver or other water feature, whereby water filters down through stones and into a hole in the top of the pot. From there it drips down into the water settled in the pot, and the dripping combined with reverberations inside the pot — and indeed resonance of the pot iteslf — make a very pleasant sound.

Comments welcome below, and anyone who has trouble viewing Quicktime videos, I’m going to add a flash player with a smaller video later today.

This video was made in widescreen format with a lot of customized settings to simulate the look of film, so any comments on that are welcome as well.

Enkoji.mov (3:55, 28MB QT .mov)

This is a test of a filter for video for my reference and your amusement. This is a tobacco filter at 100%.
I had some VIP guests last week and we went to Kiyomizu among other places.

It looks like this, now. I thought you should know that. Under restoration until 2010. It is still the original pavilion, never burned down, erected in 1480s, so you should allow them some time to shore it up nicely.

rotating headers…

and turned into an underwater spam link farm. My fault for not upgrading WordPress. Doing it now…