yum yum raw fishy

All week we eay the inventions of the canteen at work, and, healthy though it may be, by the weekend we are bored of cold bland food and soggy rice, so we eat foreign-style. There is, however, one Japanese restaurant in Kamakura which we are allowed to frequent on ocassion. Called Bowls, it serves bowls of rice with stuff on. The stuff is somewhat novel, sometimes with a Korean or maybe Californian twist. Here's their raw tuna with exotic sesame seed dressing and peculiar foreign-style lettuce-stuff! Doesn't it look delicious!?

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I saw three ships

It seems that every New Year's Day, just after dawn, three yachts launch and go sailing by at Kamakura beach. It is a curious thing. Not a very up to the minute picktur, but I tend to build up a backlog of pictures I like that I haven't got around to blogging. Meanwhile, last weekend was the Wimmin's Conference. I took lots of photos, and they'll go online, but visible only to the other Wimmin. What happens at Wimmin's Conference stays at Wimmin's Conference... ;-)

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pink and concrete

Where there is so much concrete that the camellia can't take root, pink bicycles are grown instead.

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Monday morning in Kamakura

At Kosokuji. Greens and browns replace the reds and blues of Yokohama.

But the camellia are still pink! In the interests of balance, I should point out that while there is the occasional bit of stone and wood, there is still an awful lot of concrete in Kamakura. For some reason the Japanese like to coat every possible surface with the stuff.

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Sunday morning in Yokohama

The posh shops aren't open yet so the streets are rather quiet,

which allows a crow to enjoy its breakfast in peace. Meanwhile, some dodgy manual handling is going on down a narrow staircase at the back of a building. Secure behind blue bars, the cat glares out territorialy. The camellia continue to flower pinkly.

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Trees

Earlier this month we climbed a small mountain called Hinode (which means sunrise). As it is a small mountain, most of the views are of, or through, trees. The tall straight trees are the Japanese cedars which will make people in Tokyo sneeze when they release their pollen in a couple of months time.

But this huge leaf is not from a Japanese cedar... And some sides of the hill host a more natural forest. It was a clear day and Tokyo could clearly be seen from the top. Can you see the new tallest structure in Tokyo - The Sky Tree? It is actually more similar in height to Hinode itself than to a real tree! Some of the real trees were horizontal. And here is the ever faithful pack pony.

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Dragons

While last year was year of scary monster bunnies, we are now safely in the year of the cuddly dragon. The timber merchant celebrates in the usual fashion.

All the other years have non-imaginary animals, which seems a bit odd to me.

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BIF

Having practically nailed a "BIF", which is internet photography speak for "Bird In Flight" (here on flickr and third photo down on Chrstmas Day post), I was emboldened to attempt the other sort of BIF - Boy In Flight.

The bigger boys went first, As the boys got smaller and smaller I was sure one was going to get wet, but even the tiniest one flew all the way across.
And here is a group of young adults gazing up at the flying boys, perhaps remembering the days when they too could fly...
BTW the "trick" for either kind of BIF, if you are as bad a photographer as me, is to get them flying roughly towards you, and use a camera with fast autofocus to do the rest.

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2011

2011, a set on Flickr.

That's it. I'm stuck. 24 photos for 2011.

The idea was to get down to 12, but the 24 seem to me to better tell the story of the remarkable year that was 2011. It certainly was the most interesting year of my life so far. The photos are presented in chronological order and weirdly there are none in the 24 that predate the apocalypse in March, the first being taken 2 days later.

Comments welcome!

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New Year sunrise

What everyone at the beach was waiting for.

Due to some cloud, the sun did not appear until a good 15 minutes after sunrise, but people didn't start celebrating until they saw the sun. So I wonder what happens on a fully cloudy morning. Perhaps it has never happened in living memory! Pondering living memory, we had a large (magnitude 7) earthquake yesterday, off the south coast from us. The big ones last year were north and east of here. Hmmmm... On our road the shaking was not sufficient to knock James off his unicycle, but it did go on for quite a while. I will be looking out to see how it is explained in GRL. I suppose the advantage of apocalypses is an in increase in the number of Japanese authors getting published in high impact publications, which must surely improve the national papers-per-Yen factor.

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[First sunrise of 2012, Kamakura Beach]

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