people, places, things
For Joe’s 16th birthday, Izzy came over and brought a delicious breakfast from the bakery where she works. I snapped a few. There are a few mushy ones but I thought these two best reflect “Izzy & Joe”… Oh wait, while we’re doing “Izzy & Joe,” here are a couple from the market taken in [...]
It was an extremely short summer up here in the Pacific Northwest. True, that was shortened by some of my own wanderings, but it just seemed as if there were too few of those carefree days when nothing is going on but the sun, the heat, the water and…well… Note for the record: It was [...]
I don’t remember the names but I’ll put them into the blog later. Spent the day with an old friend, Azby Brown. We took the train down to Kamakura from Yokohama and spent the day walking from temple to temple. The walks were almost as beautiful as the temples themselves. We ended the day in [...]
A few scenes from the world’s largest city: the greater Tokyo metropolitan area has over 40 million people in it. Still, there are a few pockets of calm… this is Arisugawa park, right in the middle of Hiro-o, one of the most upscale districts of the city. Amazingly, numbers in the city are not sequential. [...]
The fashion center of Japan, where people go to see and be seen. I know it’s a cliche, but here the little kawaii (“cutsie”) girls dress in costumes, hang around Harajuku station and park, and even carry model release forms for photographers who want to shoot them… (And that is pronounced tah-keh-shta, by the way…) [...]
Everybody travels by train. Everybody. In a country with an inhabitable size of New Jersey but with a population half that of the entire U.S., trains are pretty much the only option. But they are efficient. httphv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9ywuhRvOyq0
Today our office is having a lunch party to celebrate the winners of our World Cup Football pool (any excuse for a celebration!). To help prepare, I accompanied our housekeeper Truc to the market to shop for the occasion. Well, she shopped and I took snapshots… I’m not sure what it was, but everyone seemed [...]
On the weekend I took a train to the nearby seaside resort of Muine (pronounced “Moo-ee-neh”). The main beach was full of wind surfers, mostly instructors looking for prospective clients. The entire 3 mile stretch of beach was littered with, well, litter of course, but also resorts of varying quality. There was a very large [...]
On Thursday my friend Tra and her husband invited me to their home where they have opened a small restaurant. Traveling on the back of someone’s motorcycle at night can either build, or take away, from one’s appetite… I didn’t actually see this accident but it appeared as if the woman in the yellow helmet [...]
This is the future and it’s not the American homophobe of individual, personal space capsules; it’s the embracing, sociable Asian open-air style of mass transit. Entire families ride these things. Couples, friends, even strangers ride alongside each other through the maelstrom, chatting with each other on the same bike or across to each other on [...]
On Sunday morning I took a double-decker tram across downtown to Causeway Bay, where people crowd even on Sundays to shop. Behind a tram is the safest place in the entire city to ride a bike. Just be careful not so swerve! Actually on Sundays it is even more crowded because that is a holiday [...]
I took a taxi to the Peak Tram, then rode it up the peak. The driver and I started speaking Mandarin and discovered that we had both moved to Hongkong in the same year – 1979. He was thrilled. I was less so. The Siberian Fur Store has always been one of my favorite signs. [...]
