A few months ago, I received an email from someone who was moving to Nagoya and considering living in the same building in which we had lived in Kakuozan. I spent some time on Google Maps and created a map which outlined the basics of life in the area – train station, konbini, supermarkets, nearby…
The very first day we arrived in Nagoya, on our house-hunt a month before we moved there, a building just down from the main JR Station junction caught my eye with it’s stunning spiral lines. I was told that it had only just been finished and that, among other things, it housed the local design…
When we first came to Nagoya to find a home here it was late May and it was the Summer green of the trees in the street, which filled the view from the study window, that sold me on our house. The bark of those trees also filled me with a quiet hope – I…
Happy belated New Year everyone! Superman and I rarely make much of New Years Eve but since we were here in Japan we decided to join in the local tradition of heading to a shrine (that’s shrine as in Shinto, not temple as in Buddhist) for the turning of the year. Atsuta Jinja is one…
One of my local Supermarkets is called Paré Marché and at the moment its walls are littered with posters wishing us “Merry Paré Marché!” Stores all over the city have similar posters and I’m not quite sure whether they are misunderstanding the phrasing or just approaching the whole issue of the commercial overload of this…
Opening the blinds today to take advantage of the bliss that is a day cool enough to open the windows, I was met with a lovely surprise! I had thought that the variegated grass plants in our tiny terrace garden were just for greenery but it turns out they are for lilac-ery too!
We were at Red Rock which is an “Aussie bar and Grill” in Sakae (which is no longer owned by an Aussie but by a lovely American who is a lecturer at the Universities here and a member of the writers group which I will join and post on when it resumes after August hols.) We were there for the Thursday night quiz, which I highly recommend along with the steak, and we could see that it was pouring down but since the bar is on the first floor we didn’t quite get the extent of it till we left – the streets were streaming!
While browsing the NIC newsletter the other day I noticed they have a regular photo contest. This Summer’s theme is “A Japanese Summer” and I thought: what is more Natsu than fireworks except, perhaps, for flowers in full bloom so I thought I’d enter my “Hanabi no Hana” from my Gifu Natsu Matsuri evening. It…
NB.. For those of you who have stumbled on this page looking for directions and aren’t interested in a review of the shopping district of Osu Kannon (to wit: is it really the best place to go for cameras et al.) – scroll down to a little above where the photos begin. Okay, I’m not…
