Tag: Travel
It may be a silly idea, but that’s never stopped me before. Yes, travelling to Holland would be the thirteenth year where I’ve spent some or all of November out of the country.
I decided on The Hague for a few reasons. First, it would be short. I was starting a new job so I couldn’t take very much time off work. The Netherlands is just a short flight from London so there was no need to try to ask for a day off in the first few weeks! Secondly, I spent a few days in Den Haag in 2007. Unfortunately it was in December and I was working a little way out of the city centre. I wandered around after dark, looking for somewhere decent to eat but otherwise saw very little. It did look pretty, though, so I flagged it for a later visit.
Late to the party again, but I finally found what I think is a suitable image for this weeks PhotoFriday challenge, “Vivid.” This picture was taken so long ago that it’s actually on film (remember that?). It’s in Tromso, Norway. I thought the colours of the buildings and sky were very bright, deep and vivid contrasted with the snow.
- The religious excuse for barbarity – “No, we don’t respect your desire to needlessly torment animals because some hallucinating desert nomads did it centuries ago. We don’t respect it at all. You can cry that we are “persecuting” you if we stop you committing acts of cruelty if you want.”
- Penn & Teller – Penn (of Penn and Teller fame) protests the new TSA rules.
Having spent a good couple of hours looking around Kyoto I decided it was time to get out and head to Nara.
Actually it wasn’t nearly so dramatic. Nara is only an hour away on the train and it’s a much smaller, though culturally nearly as important, place. I’d be back in Kyoto in time for sunset at the Silver Pavilion.
Two things that immediately stood out were the long, shady lanes lined with these lanterns. The paths invariably had long lines of school children, some of whom would try their English on me. Even in fragments it was always way better than my Japanese.
Having “done” the big city and the nature, it was time to take in some culture. Kyoto and Nara are the “old” parts of Japan with many of the most beautiful and most famous temples. I didn’t see all of them but I did pretty well! The difference in character between them was fascinating.
Pretty much straight off the Shinkansen I headed to Kiyomizudera. This was, by far, the busiest and most crowded temple of the trip1. Quite an odd atmosphere for a temple in any case.
When I travel I don’t normally take a laptop with me1. Too big; too heavy; too fragile; too expensive; too inconvenient.
But the iPad is different. It’s smaller and lighter. The fact that it’s limited compared with my MacBook wasn’t going to a problem as I only had two main use cases for it: reading and downloading my photos.
For my last day in Nagano Prefecture I had set my sights on Kamikochi, known as one of the most scenic parts of the Japanese Alps. However, the night before I had pretty much given up all home. It had been raining heavily and it was so cloudy that you couldn’t really see the mountains around Matsumoto1, much less those any higher up.
But the next morning things looked very different. It was a bright day, with a clear blue sky and a slight chill in the air — it was, after all, October. The forecast still wasn’t promising but I thought it was worth the risk.
This weeks PhotoFriday theme, “Dark,” was easier than some of those that they’ve come up with recently! This was taken from the top of Tokyo Tower last month.
Please also vote for my entry in last weeks challenge, “Fluffy.” I’m entry number 187.
If you were to make a list of the foods that I won’t eat and then make a diet that consists almost entirely of them, you’d get pretty close to what I thought the Japanese ate.
As it happens, I was wrong. Or at least, there were plenty of options available for someone who won’t eat fish or pickles. But that’s not to say that there weren’t odd or interesting things.