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It's been a while since I've posted some nighttime shots, so here are a few I took whilst walking around The Hood over the weekend. A quiet intersection... Near the neighborhood temple... View from my balcony... One more shot after the jump, as well as links to other entries with night shots....
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Posted on: 06/30/2008 10:29 PM
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Damn, that title could have used some work, huh? *laughs* At first I was going to call it something like "tokyo upshots" but decided against it because that might bring in exactly the wrong kind of intarnets traffic... (see, 'upshots' can apparently also be used to describe (especially in Japan) the phenomenon of taking a picture up a woman's skirt... which, needless to say, is not what today's post is about.) (sorry to disappoint...) Lacking...
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Posted on: 06/01/2008 12:32 PM
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Nighttime sakura on a rainy, drenched sunday evening in Tokyo. Can you believe this is the only shot of the cherry blossoms I got all weekend? The irony of it is, last weekend was the last opportunity to see the cherry blossoms in prime bloom here in Tokyo (northern parts of Japan bloom later). Saturday was an absolutely gorgeous day, so I thought about going to see them then, but decided in the end to...
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Posted on: 04/01/2008 10:20 PM
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A bit out of chronological order, but a few weeks ago a friend and I went up to Mashiko in Tochigi prefecture on a day trip package offered through JR. Tochigi itself is famous for several things, not least of which Nikko, an important tourist attraction and a generally interesting and beautiful place to visit (especially in the autumn, save the almost unimaginable throngs of tourists - a friend told me he was stuck in...
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Posted on: 03/13/2008 10:11 PM
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Haha, in all the years I've kept this blog, I don't think I've posted as many photos of myself as I have in this entry (and the previous one). Is the panda blog turning into a venue for indulging my inner narcissisist panda? Oh my goodness, look, I can never spell that word. Narcissist. Ha. That's it. Thank goodness for spell check. Clearly the thing to do when surrounded by snow is to make a...
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Posted on: 03/09/2008 03:03 PM
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I happened to have my camera with me as I was walking home yesterday, so I decided to snap a few pictures of that perfect time in day when the sky rapidly changes from the brightness of afternoon to the duskiness of evening in the span of like a half-hour. There's only photographs in this entry (and they're all HDR images, in case you're wondering why some might seem a little "surreal"), but I just...
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Posted on: 02/11/2008 08:38 PM
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Blue skies over Tokyo Yesterday was a brilliant blue day in Tokyo so I went for a walk with a friend to Harajuku to attend to some Hatsumode-ing, about 2 weeks too late. After we were done praying for happiness, wealth, or in my case, a real live baby panda, a box of new Legos and admittance into Columbia Law school (roughly in that order), we decided to go for a walk around town to...
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Posted on: 01/15/2008 12:10 AM
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Happy New Year 2008 everyone! It's the year of the Mouse, for whatever that's worth, so umm, I hope you all have a great mouse-themed year and don't get too sloshed with the bubbly tonight ;) I'm in a good mood at the moment - it's the goyo osame end of the work year period so I'm off until next week. I'm trying to use the time to study, redesign the website and just generally...
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Posted on: 01/01/2008 01:45 PM
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I actually have been slacking a little bit when it comes to posting, not because I have a dearth of things to write about (quite the opposite, actually) but because a) I had a big test to study for earlier this month and b) after I finished that I became incredibly lazy and sloth-like because 1) it is the holidays and 2) it is cold as heck at the moment and this being Japan, my...
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Posted on: 12/26/2007 11:16 PM
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There have actually been some very disturbing things happening here in Japan land (not to me personally, but at the political/civil liberties level) that have put me in a severely depressed mood recently and are making me seriously - like, seriously - think about leaving next year, or possibly sooner. Shit, to put it nicely, is about to get a lot more oppressive is you're unfortunate enough to have the wrong skin colour and you...
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Posted on: 11/04/2007 02:25 PM
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Mmmmm.... I could nap in this spot of sun forever. I'm going to Nekobukuro later on today for the hell of it, so I figured I might as well get my practice in cat-napping before I depart. What a beautiful Autumn day! And here's what's currently playing, if you want to recreate this incredibly lazy and relaxing Sunday in your own home: Neutral Milk Hotel - Holland, 1945 (03'14" :: 160kbp vbr .mp3)...
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Posted on: 10/21/2007 11:27 AM
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After our unsettling experience putzing around the smelly Gates of Hell, we cracked open the guide book and tried to figure out where to go next. "Hey panda, I've got an idea." piped up KC as we headed away from the noxious odors of the sulfur fields. "How about visiting these temples in Yamagata?" "Sounds good!" I mumbled absent mindedly, trying not to drive the Purple Elderberry of Doom off the side of a cliff...
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Posted on: 09/02/2007 12:31 AM
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We'll get back to the Great Tohoku Road Trip 2007 in just a second, but first a brief interlude of some jumping pictures from Bart-in-Japan's final hurrah in, errr, Japan. Click to embiggen. Hey, what about trying it front-lit? Click to embiggen....
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Posted on: 08/20/2007 08:46 PM
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If there is one thing that KC and I have learned from our past adventures, it's that neither of us are much of "planners" when it comes to travel. Our general philosophy is to tack down the intended time of departure and a meeting spot, then show up and hope that someone remembered to bring a car (and if it has sufficient fuel for the journey, then so much the better). Since this approach has...
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Posted on: 08/15/2007 09:03 PM
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Whatever I thought it would be like, I'm pretty sure I didn't think it would turn out like it did - my mind going over the laundry list of things I had to do to get ready for work tomorrow, my heart heavy with the thought of having to walk to work in a wool suit in the hot sweaty mugginess of the Japanese rainy season, my eyes just moments prior flicking over train schedules to find the fastest route home after getting off at Tokyo so as to avoid time consuming transfers and giving myself a chance to catch a few precious hours of sleep before having to get up the next day. Here it was, my little moment which I had dreamed of long ago, and rather than feeling euphoric, or overjoyed with hope or optimism as I had expected, it instead felt oh so very... real...! But not real in that way that excitement tinges your tongue with feathery touches of alkali, or real in the way that hope swells your heart such that you think it will burst from your chest, but rather real as in the damp, sweaty, somewhat downtrodden leaden-ness of the everyday grind. Maybe not as real as waking up one day to find yourself a lonely bald fat low-level manager of a box plant and suddenly realising your youth is gone, but definitely real in the way that you realise you are now, at this very second and this very age of 27, engaged in a day to day struggle not to end up that way. It wasn't a sad feeling, the lack of euphoria, but just surprising that achieving one's dream - no matter how small - would feel so completely run of the mill. After all, what I was doing at that moment wasn't particularly unusual, and now that I thought of it, I had done this very same thing - eat an eki bento on a bullet train late at night - quite often in the past few years. I began to wonder: was this all there was to life? (silly I know, but I thought that). Were we lied to when told that achieving our goals was to rewarded with feelings of accomplishment, when in fact all it felt like was more of the same? Or perhaps, more disturbingly, had I set my dreams and sights too low?
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Posted on: 07/02/2007 08:20 PM
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So the weather here in Kanto has been slowly sputtering and lurching towards balmier conditions week by week. The fact that it has been an unusually warm winter - it didn't snow even once! - means that we can enjoy spring traveling a little earlier than usual. With that in mind, the lovely Kazumi - making her first appearance here on the pandablog - and I headed over to nearby Hakone for a day long...
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Posted on: 03/24/2007 07:59 PM
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Are you imagining that phrase? Now while keeping that image in your head, slowly replace those words until it becomes "like hurling heavy beanbags at immobile foreigners trapped in a crowd about 25 feet away from you from an elevated wooden platform." And then add "oh and you're a gigantic muscular sumo wrestler." It was, as they say, all fun and games until someone got hurt, and that someone would have been the random old lady who took one to the dome with a rather sharp and alarming plastick-y "srrrMMMMGAAAACCCKKK!" as the beanbag caught her with a glancing blow to the temple. She stumbled back for a second, dazed and shell shocked, then bumped up against the chest of a larger guy behind her trapped by the surging crowd and could retreat no further. I watched as she valiantly tried to struggle to her feet only to catch another round straight in the forehead, chin snapped straight back from the force of the impact as she slowly sank into the murky darkness of the trampled ground below the crowd line, one hand upstretched piteously, palm splayed, grasping uselessly at the heavens, mouth echoing out its last plaintive gasp: "Damn you ..... beeeeaaaannnnnsss........."
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Posted on: 02/11/2007 08:54 PM
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Wow, so the first post of 2007, huh? I suppose it's a bit cheap that it's gonna be primarily a photo entry, but as previously mentioned I'm heading off to Paris this Thursday - Thursday people - and I've not done any packing yet. In fact, I should probably try and figure out where all my underwear seem to have disappeared off to over the past two weeks. I'll need them for my trip and...
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Posted on: 01/02/2007 06:32 PM
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Ahhh, is it really Christmas Eve? I'll tell you what, Christmas in Tokyo just isn't the quite same as I remember it back in Wisconsin... the glass skyscrapers, endless stretches of twinkling concrete draped urban jungle... the amazing lack of any type of snow... Then again, I could sit and drink in the beautiful purples of this sunset all night long. You don't get them quite like that back in the cow pastures! Below you...
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Posted on: 12/25/2006 01:14 AM
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We finally stopped to ask a kindly mechanic who looked quite busy doing some sort of power drilling/water cooled saw-milling thing which in retrospect we probably shouldn't have interrupted. He looked at our map for a second, then put to light all our confusion with one simple phrase:
mechanic: "You're on the completely opposite side of this map"
me: "Now by 'completely opposite side' you mean…?"
mechanic: (pointing the way we just came from) "Go that way"
me: "Hmm. This explains a lot."
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Posted on: 10/17/2006 11:02 PM
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I imagine he may have been thinking of days like this past weekend, when it seems like all you can see when you look up are endless expanses of blue - blue for which there are no boundaries - seas of soaring topaz, vast swaths of azure splashed with milk clouds, indigo pigments ground up and soaking into the parchment of the sky. Such blue skies are like a perfect backdrop for the sharp intercut of the earthy relief of jagged man made constructs daring to jab upwards into the heavens with their razor sharp borders. Blues so encompassing, I couldn't but help to put something concrete in each shot as if to remind myself I am still of this terrestrial life, as if pointing the camera straight up into the very middle of the blueness and pushing that shutter might be to lose yourself into the profundity of blues so deep they saturate the very silicon of the camera sensor and reach out with their siren calls to embrace you in their greedy swallow.
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Posted on: 10/09/2006 10:59 PM
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People sometimes ask why I like tall buildings. This picture from the Mori Tower pretty much sums it all up. More sky worship after the jump...
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Posted on: 10/01/2006 10:40 PM
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Monkah and I scope out the view from the top of the mountain. Look at all that beautiful sunlight pouring down! It might not seem like much at first, but three weeks into the rainy season with nothing but gray skies and thunderstorms night and day, it's quite possibly one of the most beautiful things you'll ever see.
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Posted on: 07/07/2006 10:25 PM
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On the way back we passed by this random 35 foot tall statue of a Tyrannosaurs Rex growling fearsomely at a curve in the road, apparently as an enticement to come visit the nearby dinosaur museum. What is mildly amusing about this picture is the sign beneath the T-Rex's feet. It reads: "Are you driving safely?" And all I could think was "No, man, a goddamn dinosaur that just scared the shit out of me when I rounded the blind curve here! What do you expect!!?"
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Posted on: 05/06/2006 10:07 PM
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....until I saw these. Oh my god!! This was the first of what would soon spin into an incredibly propitious string of Yokohama Chinatown panda spottings! These are steamed dumplings with are stamped in the shape of cute little panda faces! I squealed like a school girl when I saw them and ran over to purchase one. They were pretty steep (like $3USD each) but I was all set to plop down for them, when I saw to my disappointment that they were filled with chocolate and bean paste instead of delicious steamed meat. (Actually there were ones filled with meat - the one in the topmost poster for example - but they weren't so cute so I didn't buy them). My disappointment was soon alleviated, however, when just around the corner I spied... Oh my goodness, an entire store devoted JUST TO SELLING PANDA GOODS!! I was in heaven!! I rushed over to the store, brusquely pushing aside a small 12 year old girl and two old women who were in my way (pandas are endangered, old women and little girls are not so it's all good in my book). Had I found my mecca? I think I had!!
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Posted on: 04/10/2006 08:27 PM
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It's spring break! With no big plans in the works, my ever faithful travel companion and I decided that a quickie road trip up to Takayama in nearby Gifu Prefecture would be the perfect way to spend a Saturday. What's there to do over in Takayama? Well... Historic Japan Much of Japan is rebuilt and artificial - concrete slab box buildings and shiny glass paneled convenience stores blending into a modern ugly mess. But this...
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Posted on: 04/03/2006 04:50 PM
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This picture was taken atop the mountain at Iwatayama Monkey Park (see below) by a man carrying a broom and a slingshot. We were actually just looking at the monkeys when he snatched the camera from our hands and shoved us over towards the couple of fanged screaming simians you see on the branch behind us. "You stand there. I take picture." "...b...but, those monkeys have fangs...!" we protest feebly. "You stand there. I take picture." he repeats, gesturing wildly with his slingshot. Our gaze flips back and forth between the fanged death monkeys and the almost too ethusiastic looking japanese man with a slingshot and a well worn looking broom. Monkey death? Or slingshot to the dome?
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Posted on: 02/28/2006 09:32 AM
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It was a beautiful autumn Thursday yesterday and due to a fortuitous coincidence in my schedule, I happened to be free for most of it. Somewhat on the road to recovering from the horrible cold that laid me out for a full week, I decided to make the most of the unexpectedly pleasant weather and go for a drive, camera in tote, and explore some of the lesser frequented areas of town stretching far...
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Posted on: 11/11/2005 07:53 PM
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A "farewell" party for a retiring co-worker took up most of my friday night yesterday, leaving me rather tired and exhausted this morning (well, okay, maybe that had more to do with the little "after party" pub crawl I made, but that's neither here nor there). Fortunately, the brilliant sunshine pouring in through the cracks in my curtains and painting sharp polygons on futon proved rather inspiring - hopping out of bed (and by...
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Posted on: 03/19/2005 11:29 PM
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A panda spied at the local museum. The sign reads "Tea is available. 50 yen for a cup or 150 yen for a pet (plastic) bottle. Ask the staff if you're interested". Starbucks girl approves and heads off towards the direction of the tea counter. I passed, preferring to try and snap a furtive picture of the panda when no one was looking (photography was prohibited). A rather foreboding sunset greeted us as we...
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Posted on: 03/08/2005 09:42 PM
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It's been forever since I've last updated. I apologize for the delay - the demands of real life caught up with me for a bit, and I just haven't had time to tend to the pandablog. Not this one, at any rate. The past month saw the coming and (wistfully missed) passing of winter vacation - with all the students out for a couple of weeks, hardworking teachers, one of which I occasionally pretend to...
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Posted on: 01/15/2005 03:31 PM
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The Osaka language seminar was a lot of fun. The actual classes weren't so challenging, but there were a lot of interesting JETs from all over the country, which made things much more enjoyable. Group circle shot... If July was a busy month, August is all that and a bag of chips (as the expression goes). I got back last week and right away had to head over to my new school to fill out...
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Posted on: 08/07/2004 10:23 AM
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So not much has been happening recently, despite the fact that this is a very busy time of the year. Lots of seminars and presentations to prepare for, business trips to take, formalities to attend to (I'm switching schools, which requires a lot of "showing my face" to various assorted administrative individuals who will smile, shake my hand and then promptly call me "carl" or "fernando" or some other previous ALTs name for the rest...
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Posted on: 07/12/2004 03:39 PM
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While it may seem a little ridiculous, considering how much I whined and moaned just a few months about about how ungodly cold and snowy it was here in my little corner of Japan, I now find myself doing the complete opposite and cursing the very blasted existence of summer as I sweat my way through yet another "lesson" in what must surely be the hottest, muggiest place on earth. A beautiful waterfall hidden away...
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Posted on: 07/06/2004 06:39 PM
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This week is exam week at the school, which means that last week I was really busy trying to prepare the students for the upcoming tests. Unfortunately, in my school, the students are somewhat less than concerned about even showing up for mid-terms, let alone thinking about remotely passing them. So while I drilled my little panda heart out staring at a sea of dozens of disinterested faces staring glumly into cell phones, applying...
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Posted on: 05/25/2004 03:31 PM
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What is Golden Week, you ask? Since I'm too lethargic right now to actually do any in-depth explanation, let me steal the following description from the Japan-guide: "The Golden Week is a collection of four national holidays within seven days. In combination with well placed weekends, the Golden Week becomes one of Japan's three busiest holiday seasons, besides New Year and the Obon week." A high flying flag signals the start of festival festivities! That...
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Posted on: 05/07/2004 03:31 PM
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Friday, April 09, 2004 One of the ways you know it's spring is when the cherry blossoms start to bloom. For a period of about 2 weeks in late march and early april (depending on where you live) the entirety of Japan is awash in brilliant pink cherry blossom flowers - big bushy masses of sakura on trees, petals blowing about the street, gentle winds sweeping massive arcs of velvety pink curls into all manner...
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Posted on: 04/09/2004 03:31 PM
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it's so weird. sometimes the smallest choices, made almost without thinking, can have the most unexpected consequences. There's a term used in the common language for this sort of phenomenon: The Butterfly Effect. Giving thanks at the shrine. Now the new Ashton Kutcher movie of the same name not withstanding, the basic idea of the "Butterfly Effect" is that the smallest of events can have impossibly large ramifications farther down the line. It is usually...
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Posted on: 02/17/2004 03:31 PM
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I was visiting my friend's house earlier today and while we were cooking in her kitchen, I began to realize that it's the little things about this country that I love so very much. I think I understand now what Japanese mean when they say "living in Japan is convenient". Above you can see the dishwasher. This very compact, but highly efficient model slides in flush to seamlessly blend in with the rest of the...
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Posted on: 02/04/2004 03:31 PM
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This being winterbreak, naturally my sleep cycle has become totally disrupted. The first day of my break I made the mistake of staying awake until 4am, then waking up at 3pm the next day. This has led to an increasingly bizarre sleeping pattern which I attempted to fix yesterday by trying to sleep for 24 hours straight. Unfortunately, this plan didn't work out quite as I had envisioned and instead had some unexpected repercussions. Look...
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Posted on: 12/30/2003 03:31 PM
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Tommorrow is the Autumnal Equinox Day - time for Japanese to honor their ancestors and the deceased, and time for me to catch up on my sleep / lesson preparations. The weather has been slowly turning more and more autum-like, which is absolutely thrilling for me. Finally the oppressive dog days of summer are gone! ;) Anyway, don`t have anything interesting to post today, so please enjoy a picture of the Sai river located right...
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Posted on: 09/22/2003 03:31 PM
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Driving along the ocean... [Just as a note: this entry is going to take forever to load. Sorry. :) ] In the entirety of the noto peninsula, there really exists no town, place or destination that could in all good conscience be referred to as "noteworthy". Certainly blessed with an abundance of nature, a welcome lack of urban sprawl and multiple onsens which claim to fight all manner of ailments, the Noto peninsula nonetheless...
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Posted on: 09/16/2003 03:31 PM
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wow... back from the deep inaka after several days. And only a few bruises to show for it ;) Spent the weekend (and significant portions of the week, hmm...) up in anamizu, for a matsuri, super sneaky surprise birthday party, ocean-side frolicking and so forth. Too sleepy to write about it now, but maybe tommorrow / the day after - pictures forthcoming as well. But for now, I have to make lesson plans for...
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Posted on: 09/15/2003 03:31 PM
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fuuuuhhh.... just another day. My first official "real" paycheck is on Thursday. Whoo-hoo!! I am thinking about taking a trip somewhere just to celebrate, especially since I have cultural furlough all this week. I`ve come to the conclusion that the hood can be very pretty in the rain. Actually, I like the way Japan looks in the rain in general. Even the most crappy psuedo-slummy area in the biggest of cities looks so much more......
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Posted on: 08/18/2003 03:31 PM
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