Bisdak Babbles

I’m late posting my photo hunt entry! I hope I haven’t posted these yet as photo hunt entries. These are 2007 spring pictures of Kyoto - my favorite place in Japan, and I think the most beautiful, too!

Happy photo hunting!

I love autumn and here’s the reason why…

At Osaka Castle grounds, Fall 2007

These are just short spans of the very LONG hiking trail at the Fushimi Inari Taisha Shrine in Kyoto. This shrine is dedicated to Inari, the Shinto god of rice. The 4km trail is covered with thousands of these orange torii (gateways), offerings made by worshippers - this explains those markings on the toriis.

Uphill

Downhill
The trail stretches to the top of the Inari-san hill. Good thing we went there early autumn last year. It took us almost 2 hours to cover the whole trail.
Here’s Kagz and Me, near the main gate of the shrine:
By the way, have you seen Memoirs of a Geisha? Remember that part where young Sayuri ran through a path covered with orange gates? That was in Fushimi Inari Taisha. Wishing you all a very long and nice weekend. Thank you for dropping by!

The pictures below show why I fell in love with Seishin-chuo, Kobe (the location of the previous company). I roamed around at lunch break today and took the following pictures. Due to extreme sunlight, some pictures seem to be damaged… I even got a “too much heat” warning from my cellphone! Hope you’ll enjoy the autumn views. ^-^

After a stressful day of squeezing technical stuffs and blogs into our brains, this refreshing sight marks the end of the day. This is what we see as soon as we step out of the office…

Summer is really the festival season here in Japan, and this candle lighting at Minoh City is one of them. I think it’s the Festival of the Fire and Drum? Since this festival mainly includes candle lighting, it starts at 7PM and ends exactly at 9PM, starting today. I’m sorry I don’t know until when.

The road to the Minoh Waterfall was lighted with candles. Hiking was great because the place was cool but the candles gave me goosebumps. It felt like the All Souls’ Day in the Philippines! But it was fun and there were many people… and dogs.

This trip made my legs ache but I’ll definitely visit it again especially on autumn AND during daytime.

For “personalized” information on how to get there, click here. Here are the pictures! Please bear with my phone camera

Once again, the Sakura Hunters, equipped with 2-3 onigiri* each, headed to Kyoto for another Sakura adventure.

(1) Toji Temple
We just went there to see the 5-story pagoda but weren’t able to get close to it; not with the 1000-yen admission fee! So we just took pictures “within our reach”. ^-^

(2) Kyoto Botanical Garden
For the 200-yen admission fee, we got the chance to gaze upon Sakura trees, tulips, pine trees, etc. I think the place is much better than other Hanami spots because it’s less crowded than other places (probably because it closes at 5:00PM?).

(3) Kamigamo Shrine
We went there last week but the pink sakura was not yet in “mankai*” mode. Much to our disappointment, the pink sakura tree had just started to bloom:

We were uplifted when we saw a woman wearing a Japanese costume different than that of a geisha (I have no idea from what era that costume belonged to). I was impressed and grateful that the woman just kept on smiling even though many people crowded around her and took her picture. I was able to steal some shots:



(4) Lost
For the second time, on our way to Arashiyama, we got lost. But this time, we were happy we got lost because we found this gem that we assumed few people knew about:



(5) Arashiyama
This time, we arrived at Arashiyama before dark. We were able to climb the mountain and since most of the Sakura viewers were already on their way home, we have few rivals in posing in these beatiful scenes:



(6) Yasaka Shrine
This is near the train station so we designated this to be one of the last stops. The place was still very crowded that we had to make bold steps to pose behind this Sakura tree:



(7) Gion
Our last stop. Typical of our visits here, we walked through this old district hunting for geishas. Indeed, we saw more than 5 of them but they walked so fast that we were not able to get a clear picture. We even temporarily became “peeping toms” to steal a look at those ladies.



You could find more pictures in my Picasa Web Album.
And my favorite picture in this adventure:



——————————————
Japanese Terms:
onigiri = is a snack of Japanese rice formed into triangle or oval shapes and wrapped in nori (, edible seaweed?).
mankai = full bloom