1. Has your house been renovated?
Oh yes, in a big way.
2. Have you ever painted a room?
Many times. Every time we moved house, while helping others move into a new space, etc. It’s an ok activity, if you have the proper tools and paint — cheap brushes and cheap paint gives the worst results.
3. Have you ever put in a new floor in a house?
Yes. We did the top floor ourselves: laminated flooring. It worked out quite well. But when we needed a new floor for the ground floor last year, we took one look at the odd corners there, and let a professional (our neighbour) handle it.
4. Have you ever worked with wallpaper?
I’ve done a few lines of wallpaper, but nothing major. Klik and her mother did the photo wallpaper in our bedroom, and I hear that was not a particularly pleasant experience.
5. Have you ever choose new colors for your flat or house?
We tend to go for neutral, cream-colour for the walls, and let the colour come from our furniture (which is how we ended up with a purple couch).
1. Is there a particular historical period or event, anywhere in the world, that fascinates you?
The birth of the computer during WW2 is fascinating, and it gets more fascinating the more I learn about it.
2. Would you like to visit that time, or live in it permanently, or does the whole idea make you want to run screaming?
I’d rather not live in a time when a few fascist states dragged the whole world into war while setting out on a campaign of genocide. So, no.
3. What’s the best piece of historical writing, nonfiction or fiction, you’ve ever read?
Robert van Gulik’s Judge Dee novels are excellent. They’re good representations of life in Tang dynasty China (the books are kept in print by the university of Chicago, where the books are compulsory reading for their China studies program). But apart from that, they’re cool mysteries too!
4. What’s the worst?
Dunno. I don’t finish bad books.
5. Is there a historical site you would love to visit? Ise Grand Shrine is still on my list. Maybe next time we visit Japan.
We had only been at Narita-the-airport, and never at Narita-the-town. Turns out that it has a hugely important temple in the middle of it!
The main temple square. There were a few large halls and a pagoda, and lots of statues on a slope.
But there was another temple square higher up, with more halls!
And still higher up, there was another square with a brand-spanking new temple hall and a huge stupa!
Below there is a European-style garden with a large fountain. Kinda weird combination.
And a waterfall constructed in the forest there to aid in your mountain ascetism.
The next day we would return home. This is us posting the wifi router we used, in the last postbox before going through security.
But of course there is a Pokemon store at the airport! Here, the special plushies are Pikachu in Japan Airlines uniforms.
You can get omiyage (edible souvenirs) right upto departure at the gate! This is five minutes before boarding…
The super-cool installation at the new extension at Helsinki airport. It shows a 360-degrees view of a location in Finland, and it is both glorious and relaxing.
The next day, we collected the cats from their ‘boarding house’. Because we’re not really home if the cats aren’t there.
We dragged our big suitcases via an optimised route to Tokyo Station, to the takyubin desk there in order to forward them to our last stop in Japan, our hotel in Narita. This is the atrium at the south end of Tokyo Station.
There is also a Pokemon store there, in “character street”: a corridor in the station’s shopping area filled with shops with ‘character goods’.
The next day we walked about the Nezu shrine, close to the apartment we were staying at. It was a bit busy (a Sunday after all), but not too crowded. The shrine itself is built similar to the Tokugawa shrine in Nikko, so it’s quite beautiful.
But the star of the show was the azalea garden! Most of the shrubs were in full bloom, and it was really impressive.
After that, we walked to Yanaka Ginza and had a stroll about. After that we went to Ueno for a stroll in the park. We were not the only ones who had that plan…
Ueno Park is known for its cherry trees. It was already towards the end of the season, and this was one of the few trees still full in blossom.
There was a festival going on at the Benzaiten shrine at Ueno, with lots of food stalls. We ended our binge with choco bananas!
Then we went to the Meishu Center next to the Kanda shrine for some sake tasting! Great fun, would definitely do it again!
The next day, the weather was super nice! And we had to turn the car in only at the end of the afternoon, so we decided to spend some time in Kawagoe and enjoy the sights without being cold, wet and miserable. This is the Hikawa shrine.
Behind the shrine is a river lined with cherry trees.
The street with the traditional houses. Almost all of it were shops, but most of them had really nice things instead of the cheap touristy stuff.
The watchtower. It also serves as the gate to a temple.
Candy alley! I had expected a lot of dagashi shops, but there was only one. The rest was all rather upscale.
Next day in Tokyo, when shopping in Ginza for incense (at a department store) and paper (at the phenomenal Ito-ya), we also briefly swung by the Kabuki theatre.
The crazy crowds at Asakusa’s main temple.
As I said: crazy crowds. It’s at the top of any “must-see” areas in Tokyo, so everybody comes here. It was simply too crowded with tourists who were not paying attention at where they were going.
We fled the scene and went to Kappabashi-dori, a street lined with shops catering to restaurants, offering tablewares, cutlery, but also wax models of food etc. This is their ‘patron Kappa’.
We had a stopover at Takasaki, and decided to schedule a day of sightseeing there when we found out they have a hill with cherry trees and a giant Kanon statue. When we arrived in town, we were intrigued by the large number of Daruma dolls everywhere, and it turns out that the temple that introduced them is in Takasaki! We would have even made a detour for a visit there, but now we just stumbled upon this gem! These are some of the cherry trees at the entrance.
The largest Daruma doll ever!
At the hill with the Kanon statue, overlooking the city through the cherry blossoms.
The Kanon statue. Her expression is one of disappointment, not of empathy, I thought.
They had one of those handy cellphone stands too!
There was a temple elsewhere that was famous for its weeping cherry trees, but their blossoming season had already passed…
But there were some cherry trees there that were still in full bloom, so it was not a total waste!
Then we went to Kawagoe. First place we went to was Kita-In temple. It was raining quite hard, and we found the saddest festival waiting for us: everything was closed and wet and cold.
They have 540 individual statues of Buddha’s followers. We studied them all.
The traditional centre of Kawagoe, where the houses were made in the same method of storehouses — the merchants of Kawagoe were just that rich! But we were cold and miserable from all the rain, so we retired to our inn quite early.
En-route from Kofu to Matsumoto, we went to a gorge where a lot of minerals and crystals could be found. Just look at that giant chunk of crystal!
There was a waterfall too.
Matsumoto Castle! One of the few castles from the Shogunate Era that survived intact.
In line to get inside the castle! It was very busy…
Another nice view, after we saw everything there was to see inside.
The roof of an old sake brewery that was relocated to a street with lots of traditional storehouses. You could walk around it, which was fun.
After leaving Matsumoto, we visited a wasabi farm! Such a relaxing atmosphere there, and the fresh wasabi we had was so super-delicious! Nothing like the horseradish-paste that goes for wasabi in sushi restaurants over here…
This was a little parking spot next to Lake Saiko, with a gorgeous view of Mt Fuji. Unfortunately, the crappy front-cam of my cellphone couldn’t handle the lighting situation. You’ll just have to take my word for it.
There was an open-air museum with farmhouses with traditional thatched roofs, also with a view of Mt Fuji. (Because face it: it’s so high that no matter where you go in the area, you have a view of Mt Fuji.)
Next day, we decided to do the extra-touristy thing and take a boat ride on the lake. This is us in line.
Breathtaking view of Mt Fuji from the water. It was a bit cold and windy, but it was absolutely worth it.
We had a combination ticket of the boat and the ropeway up Mt Katcha-Katcha (which has a really brutal story associated with it, of a rabbit burning a raccoon dog alive, but you wouldn’t know it from the cute rabiit and raccoon figures sprinkled about). It was very busy, so we got a numbered ticket and went to buy cookies and something to drink. We relaxed at the water’s edge and kept an eye on the website that kept track. This is us finally in line to board the car — we were really jam-packed in there!
The view was worth it, though.
We also went to the Kubota Art Museum, which displays the mind-numbingly beautiful tie-dyed kimono Mr Kubota made. Unfortunately, we were not allowed to take photos inside. And I still can’t understand why the souvenir shop didn’t have a nice photo book of his work — because we probably would have bought two. This is the main gate to the ‘front garden’.
The only place you were allowed to take photos inside was in the cafe, which used to be the room where Mr Kubota did his design drawings, apparently.
The next day, we went to Kofu! The cherry trees were in full bloom at the shrine we visited. After lunch we went to (the site of) Kofu Castle, which had an excellent view of the city.
After the relentlessly commercial Glass Forest, we went to the Hakone Open Air Museum, which is really cool. Modern art statues and installations in the open air, what is not to like? There were quite a few installations that kids could climb on, which was really cool. And they have a lot of Picasso stuff — this is the “Marching Flower” (which also was a Pokemon Go gym…)
The extremely cool Picasso Tower, made with glass-in-concrete. It’s really tall, and the light shines through it, and you can go all the way up over the double-helix spiral staircase and see if you can make out some of the figures.
The next day, we went to visit the Lalique museum, with its gorgeous collection of jewelry and glasswork. Next to it was a cafe where we had lunch. In the other part of the building they had a wagon from the Orient Express, which you could visit at designated times (and when we were there, we couldn’t go there, alas.)
We went to our next destination: Fujikawaguchiko, driving through a snowstorm! The next day, we went to visit the Chureito Pagoda. After a navigational mishap that saw us make a large detour over a toll road, we arrived at the parking lot.
Halfway up the mountain to the pagoda. It was a brisk climb, but we were too cheap to get the taxi that was ferrying people to the top.
That is the pagoda! Mt Fuji could have been see on the left side of the pagoda. The cherry trees were not yet blossoming, unfortunately.
We went to the Ice Cave, a cave that contains… ice. It’s so cold in there, that the ice survives the summer. But we had to wear helmets because we had to crawl through narrow spaces. Look at the scratches on those helmets!
Then we went to the Wind Cave, about a kilometer down the road. This is already down the stairs, before entering the cave itself. (The ceilings were higher there, so no helmet needed.)
The Wind Cave had even more ice in it than the Ice Cave! We felt a bit cheated, especially since it wasn’t particularly windy in there either.
Then we went to the Bat Cave, which is even further down the road. It was pretty quiet there, and this was the most impressive cave system. We didn’t see any bats, because those were behind doors and it was daytime anyway.
There was a little museum there, and of course a museum at a Bat Cave should have an exhibition of Batman posters!
okay
accomplished
calm
tired
hungry
mellow
cold
content
amused
