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…
Any native English speakers living in Japan will have experienced Japanese English speakers/students when lost for either words or courage flip out their electronic dictionaries and deftly tap away with their thumbs till they come up with the English word they need. At this point they will either show you the screen or say the…
Though I am basically just hiding from the heat while Superman works and sleeps and works again, we did manage to get out on August 2nd and take in the fireworks in Gifu. Gifu is somewhere that I have longed to go all my life as they have some astonishing flower festivals in Spring. I’m…
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…
We have furniture! Yay! Doubly ‘Yay’ because frankly this house is going to be where we will be for the majority of the next 2 months or so – partly because Superman is just doing the 9-5 Mon-Fri thing pretty much as he was in Australia and I’m not going to go discovering too much…
In Japan it is still the case that most workers are "company men." Leaving a company before you retire to simply start working somewhere else is something which is only just becoming more popular but still by no means common. These days, a person gets his status from which company he works for more so…
Like so many people, one of the things I’ve always loved about Japan is their design. The Zen-influenced minimalism of their architecture and landscape architecture was introduced to me as the ultimate design when I was a small child and so I have held simple elegance above all other design for as long as I…
Have I said how magnificent the early evening winds are here? Seriously worth the heat of the day (esp if you can hide from it inside with air-con but even then…) /happy sigh
