ok as promised this is primarily a photo blog. these photos speak for themselves, except where i interrupt. i have discovered strawberry mochi and pocky and today we went to a shrine sale where i bought all the presents i plan to give out for the next year, plus picked up a silly amount of kimonos for myself.

                                     

here’s my mom and i, relaxing:

now i have to go continue to relax, so enjoy:

hiroshima (atomic dome {the bomb exploded just over this dome, but the angle of the heat and blast somehow preserved the structure, flattening everything around it}, museum, peace park and memorial…ask me sometime to see the rest, i took a lot of devastating photos there that just aren’t for this type of space)

castles, palaces, shrines and temples (one of my favorite colors, vermillion {red-orange}, turns out to be a holy color to ward off evil spirits. there’s a golden palace which, in the sunlight, is nearly impossible to look upon. i was not allowed to take photos inside the famous shogun castle fortress called nijo-jo, due to the age of the wall paintings. the floor in there is called a nightingale floor because it makes a singing nightingale noise when anyone walks through, making it impossible for an enemy to arrive unannounced. somewhere in these i am drinking holy water from karamizu-dara. i tried to capture both the grandiose size of this stuff and the intricate details):

the geisha of gion (these women are literally running down the street in shoes i could only call impossible. i did not want to run after them, as some of the photographers were doing there, so these are shots in motion from a slight distance, as well as shots of the street itself, full of very discreet windowless restaurants with red lanterns that come on around 6pm. we dodged many upscale cabs with businessmen looking down and away from us.):

gardens, my favorite part {a candid shot of my grasshopper god is in here}:

fuji (on the trip home from kyoto. i took lots of photos of her but this is the clearest…she is in the distance and the sky is thick with moisture, if the sun weren’t behind her you couldn’t have seen her at all. there’s no mistaking her once you get your eyes on her. this is the best i could do from the bullet train…)

bathrooms, me, and me in bathrooms:

(alongside the toilets you can choose where you want a spritz of water, front or back, or do you want the seat heated?)

(in the subway, stores, restaurants you can literally cop a sqaut – surprisingly convenient and clean cause you don’t have to touch anything.)

and somehow the mirrors, when you shower, have a part that doesn’t steam over! i tried to capture this in a post-shower photo-shoot – peep the kimono:

so cool. there’s a lot more pictures, still going through them all, i took around 300, thank god for digital 🙂 but this last one is the type of thing that just makes me love japan:

yes, that’s a giant plastic cat.