Unsettled

 

No sooner was I back to my computer and to happily writing and photographing the world as I came to it, when a sudden trip has whisked us off across France in search of an apartment to live in. This means that I am back to posting with my phone, on the road. I don't mind this per se, but it works very poorly. Knowing this has caused me to hedge my bets and once again post a few things to tide me over until I return.

Fortunately I have two months of material!

I did post a large number of my pictures along the way of our travels, but often without much context or organization. I don't really even know what pictures I've already showed you, but I think it would be better if I didn't worry about that. Instead I am going to go into my rather large pile of highly edited and constructed pictures and pick some random ones out that catch my eye. You may or may not have seen any of these, but for a little travelogue fun I will try to add a few notes here to give these pictures a little more context for you.

This first picture is extremely doctored.

If there was any bona fide tourist location in our very humble and delightful Kyoto neighborhood it would be the Daitoku-ji Temple, which was really a kind of huge park of Zen Temples near our house. While one could walk through the area, only certain of the many famous temples were visitable, and those for a fee, all of which we paid. Most of these pictures are from this area today. This first one was taken of a closed and locked up building, and taken through a crack in the doors. I lightened it to visibility. After that I added in a stream and a cat. Then I made it into a ink painting scroll. But it was a lovely area and this fairly well captures the fancy of looking into that closed and mysterious world.

This also is from the same temple complex, along a long walled path at the southern entrance that we rarely used. I was fascinated by Japanese manhole covers, but my one minute method of photography did not let me do a survey of them (anyway, tokyo's were the best I have ever seen and I adored them!). Honestly this was not the best part of the temple complex, but I was not entirely able to resist its grand symmetries.

This is still in the same temple complex where a bamboo grove grew behind a bamboo fence (and also behind one of its impressive border walls). There is a very famous a tourist mobbed area of bamboo forest in the city's west (Arashiyami, a neighborhood we loved but never went back to). But I was pretty enamored of this grove (not tourist mobbed!) and have some nice pictures too of crows on a wall in front of it.

But this is just a tree, and a fence, and then the bamboo.

This is from a world heritage temple sight in Uji, which is a famous green tea and tourist area of Kyoto- like a city of it's own, but its also kind of a part of Kyoto. This is from the Byodoin Temple. It was pretty! It was a Phoenix Temple, with phoenixes on the roofs. We were mainly interested in the tea in Uji though and drank a lot of it. And to our surprise the best tea was in the tea room of this temple complex! 

Oh the tea was something else! Gyokuro for the win! I did not much care about tea until I tasted gyokuro! It is savory. It is... oh... it...

There were no deer.

Cafe Zino was to the south of the Daitoku-ji Temple complex, and maybe a bit west? An old man made excellent coffee there and played jazz albums of which he must have had a thousand. The Jazz was all popular commercial jazz of the 40's and 50's, most of it now largely forgotten by the world. The whole thing was strange, calm, amazing, and perfectly normal for Kyoto. So I made him a poster.