On Sunday I went to Kamakura with Junko and visited, among other things, the Giant Buddha or Daibutsu in Japanese.

For the rest of the photos, check out my .Mac Web Gallery.

My parents recently spent a couple of weeks in Turkey and posted me a couple of little blue beads as a memento. Apparently the beads are intended to ward off the evil eye (?!) and it was suggested it would be a good idea to dangle them off my phone Japanese-style…

After a whole 9 months in Japan, I start Japanese lessons again on Thursday – this time for 1 1/2 hours, twice a week.

You never know, I might one day reach the stage where my Japanese seems better when not under the influence…

One of the nice things about holidays is that you get a little more time to experiment – I thoroughly enjoyed playing around with my new Canon IXY 800IS (that’s an IXUS for those of you outside Japan) when travelling around Japan for the last couple of weeks.

More specifically, I played around taking a few panoramas. I’ve not yet had a chance to go through them all, but I thought I’d post up a QuickTime of the view from Miyajima.

I’ve been playing around with DoubleTake to do the stitching and have been fairly impressed with the results.

Yesterday we spent a misserable day in Aso. While it’s arguabkly one of the most attractive places I’ve yet to visit in Japan, the bad weather made it hard to find much to do.

A slight break in the weather did afford us the oportunity to glimpse into the ‘depths’ of the still-active Mt. Aso (photos to come). But, for much of the day, we sought out indoor pursuits – one of which was a 45 minute performance by trained monkeys.

Certainly something more to Japanese (or perhaps Victorian) tastes, alhough mobidly fascinating, it left a nasty taste in my mouth.

Through the ages there seems to exist a strange fascination with trying to make animals behave in more humanoid ways – making monkeys walk as bipeds, dolphins perform ball tricks, … etc. Sadly, these animals are more advanced and skillful in their natural habitats than we and it smacks of arrogance that we try to make them seem more impressive and intelligent by taking the out of these environments and have them emulate us.

End rant.