I'm always a bit nervous, posting when I travel - like half of you are burglers, just waiting to pounce on my collection of art supplies and old paperbacks the second I leave for the airport. Other people manage it, but I just don't feel comfortable. So I don't blog from location, but I don't have a smokescreen of cleverly pre-planned blog posts either. Next time, maybe I'll get to grips with it. In the meantime, here are some photos from my oh, so inspiring trip to Japan earlier this month.
These weren't even prize winners. Just ordinary flowers outside an ordinary house. If you want to grow prize-winning chrysanthemums, you can't even go away for the weekend.
A little cat shrine outside a cat shop. No, I don't know what a cat shop is either; it was closed. Cats are very popular in Japan.
Tenugui - these beautiful multipurpose cloths - are too beautiful to be used in my opinion. I collect them, and, very rarely, buy them as gifts too.
Komorebi (木漏れ日) means sunlight filtering through foliage. How beautiful is that?
Traditional Japanese sweets
Wagashi are delicious with green tea. They aren't as sweet as western sweets and go well with the slight bitterness of the tea.
Even the food you eat on the train is beautiful!
I have pen remorse - not for those I bought, but those I left behind. Sigh.
And these autumn sweets are on a tenugui - how excited was I? The pancakes are filled with chestnut paste and stamped with chestnuts. The floral looking things are bean paste and whole chestnuts. There are little sweet pinecone shaped sweets. And the squares are jelly flavoured with walnut, black sesame and chestnut.
Well, not so late at this point, but lots of good food for snacking on with beer.
There were people dressed as robots. There were people fighting robots. There were people riding inside strangely busty robots. It's kind of hard to explain.
Cheerful autumn fruit from a lovely old woman at the side of the road on a lovely day out with Shaney and Hiro.