Two weeks in Japan

It's hard to believe that we've already been back from Japan for two and a half weeks and I haven't gotten around to posting any of my pictures yet. Since I took thousands of photos and don't want to flood my blog with them, I'll just put up a few of my favorites, and link to my Flickr account for anyone who's interested in looking at the rest of them.

The Tokyo Tower and the Rainbow Bridge, seen from Odaiba in Tokyo

We spent about a week in Tokyo, split over five days when we first got to Japan and then our final two days before leaving. It's hard to sum up our time there: we saw and did a little of everything, from shopping in Shinjuku, to looking at artifacts in the Tokyo National Museum, to visiting the boardwalk in Odaiba, to walking around little neighborhoods that felt like they were hundreds of miles from the city. I was impressed by how easy it was to get around - I built a lot more travel time into our itinerary than we needed, but that gave us extra time to see and do more things.

Kids on a field trip looking at the Great Buddha at Kamakura

We also wanted to see more of Japan than just Tokyo. Like many tourists, we made a day trip from Tokyo to Kamakura. Despite it being a very tourist-y thing to do, we loved visiting Kamakura, and it was one of our favorite days that we spent in Japan.

Whale shark and friends in the Osaka Aquarium Kaiyukan

We spent the second week in Osaka and Kyoto. I had been wanting to visit Osaka ever since I found out that they have a great aquarium, and great food. Neither of these things disappointed. The rain all day on Saturday did disappoint, especially since I ended up getting a cold after spending the day with soaking wet feet, but fortunately that was the only truly bad weather we had.

Nara deer

From Osaka, we made a day trip to Nara. Like Kamakura, it was a great day of visiting temples and shrines, and I liked seeing the deer there and feeding them crackers.

Kiyomizudera in Kyoto

The Kyoto part of our trip was, in a way, the inspiration for the whole thing. I really wanted to see their famous maple leaves in the fall, so for a couple of years, we've been saying, "Let's go to Kyoto in November." It was a dream but I wasn't sure it would ever happen, so I'm so happy that we really did make it there. The maple leaves were nearly at their peak when we visited, and it was really beautiful.

Maple leaves at Kodaiji in Kyoto

It was a really great trip - we managed to see and do everything we hoped to do, from the big stuff like seeing landmarks and historic sites, to weird little things on my bucket list like visiting a cat cafe, shopping in a Japanese craft store, and eating okonomiyaki in Osaka and green tea ice cream in Kamakura. If you'd like to see the rest of my photos, here's my collection on Flickr.

Texas

Here's another excuse for my long lack of updates, but this one only covers one week: I was in Texas in early September, visiting relatives in Austin and New Braunfels. The last time I was in Austin was too long ago for me to remember, so it was nice to see someplace "new" to me. I only had a few full days there so I'm looking forward to going back and seeing more of the city.

I am also looking forward to another visit so that I can eat more BREAKFAST TACOS. All I really knew about them were that they existed, in Austin, in apparently copious amounts. Now I know that they are one of the best breakfast foods you can eat.

Also while we were in Austin, it was my donut day, so this happened:

I did not eat all of them. But, 50% of them were consumed by a single person, who shall remain unidentified.

In between the days in Austin, we went down to New Braunfels, where my grandmother used to live and where that side of the family still gets together to drink beer, play poker and go tubing.

It was a nice trip, long overdue. I ate more meat each day than I usually eat in a month, saw at least six lizards, and was yielded to in a crosswalk by a legit cowboy driving his pickup truck. And the 90+ degree temperatures made me appreciate the feeling of fall that greeted me when I got back home.

More Austin and New Braunfels photos are in my Flickr sets.

PS. While I was making this post, I realized that there was no good reason to be using such tiny pictures all through my blog, so I went through and resized them. All.

Raindrops on roses and zucchini pizza

On Saturday, I was feeling restless but the weather was not cooperating with my original plans of going to the botanic garden. It had drizzled all morning and the forecast was for scattered storms the rest of the day, so it seemed like outside stuff was not a great idea. The idea of being inside all day was making me stir crazy, though, so we decided to take our umbrellas and go to the park. And of course, it didn't rain at all, and was even hot and sunny by the time we left. I was a little disappointed, actually, because once I came around to the idea I was looking forward to walking around and taking pictures in the rain.

Dinner on Saturday night was zucchini pizza, based on this recipe but with my own substitution of caramelized onions for the olives. It was delicious, and fit in well with my "unhealthy" theme for this week's CSA box: turning beets into brownies, red cabbage into a side dish for sausage and spaetzle, and peaches into cobbler à la mode.

In yarn news, I'm almost done!:

Although this picture is a bit deceptive. I don't think my scarf will be long enough with just one skein, so after I finish this one off I'll probably keep going for another eight inches or so. But it is exciting to see the end of the skein coming up. My goal is to finish this project by July 27 (shouldn't be a problem) because after much confusion and dithering, I decided that I wanted to participate in the Ravelympics Ravellenic Games this year. I'll be knitting my first shawl! We'll see how that one goes.

Lavender & rosemary

On Sunday, we went out to Destiny Hill Farm for their Lavender Fest. We picked a bunch of lavender, ate lavender-flavored ice cream, and walked around enjoying not being in the city.

Today, because we have house guests coming who loved these cookies the last time I made them, I baked rosemary-lemon cookies. I still had some of the rosemary that came in our CSA box a few weeks ago, so this also counts as another CSA recipe. This recipe is so easy, and so good - I usually find cookies too fussy to make, but these I love.

Cherry blossoms

Last weekend the cherry blossoms started to bloom, so I went out several times over the past week to take pictures. Seeing this sight every spring is one of my favorite things about living here, plus it was a good opportunity to play with the new lens I bought.









Plenty more cherry blossom pictures in my Flickr set!

Christmas

We've had our apartment decorated for Christmas for about a week now, so I wanted to share:

It makes me happy.

Another thing that makes me happy: finishing off my Bias scarf yesterday! On the same day as I finished my last assignments for my final semester of my degree, no less.

Now I need to make a few more of these ornaments. All the ones I'd already made are hanging on our tree now, but I want to do some more to give as gifts.

11/11/11

Here's the picture I took at 11:11 on 11/11/11 to add to Flickr's group. And here are some more I took this afternoon, walking around the neighborhood:

 

Yay fall colors!

Pretty

  

Pretty fall day...

Pretty latte....

And pretty happy with how my Bias scarf rescue operation turned out. I got all the stitches back on the needles, correctly oriented, and managed to salvage most of the yarn-overs that I had no idea what to do with. There are two, I think, where I didn't get the correct number of twists, and you can tell if you're staring at that row looking for that particular mistake, but those two places will be minuscule compared to the whole scarf when it's finished. Once I go a few rows further, I think even I will probably have a hard time finding them... but for now, I am putting that aside to work on crochet because I need some instant gratification. 

Spring (please)!

We're supposed to get an inch of snow tomorrow. I'm not going to think about that. I'm going to look at these photos I took today of the cherry blossoms, and pretend that it was forecast to be 60 degrees and sunny all weekend.