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Today I treated myself to a shojin ryori lunch at Izusen in Kyoto, and while a bit pricey at ¥4200, I have to say that it’s probably the best meal I’ve had in Japan. The food was so so so delicious. I really love good vegetarian food that uses ingredients creatively to make interesting and tasty dishes. I had the teppatsu ryori set, which was served in special lacquerware bowls that are meant to fit neatly inside of each other as they are emptied.

The restaurant is located in the Daitokuji Temple complex, which was lovely to wander through and have a peek at the gardens.

Bento.com has some information about Izusen, as well as another location next to Kyoto station that I wish I’d known about sooner.

There are lots of pictures of food served there on flickr. I only snagged a shot of the outside because… I was too busy eating my food to take pictures of it…

I was so determined to work at getting a photoblog running the other day that I even put off watching the latest episode of Hanazakari no Kimitachi e. It’s a japanese drama that I’m totally hooked on, even though the story is quite ridiculous. In fact, it’s probably because the story is so ridiculous that I like the show. It’s impossible to take seriously, and I guess that’s what makes it fun to watch. The show’s tagline is Ikemen Paradise which means something like hottie paradise. Yup. Ha. More info (in english) on the show can be found here.

One of the things I really like about the show though is the videography. They seem to use a wide angle lens, which gives a different kind of feeling from what I’m used to seeing in TV shows. I don’t know why, but I just love the look of the wide angle shots and the really saturated colors. I find those are the kind of pictures I like to take as well, wide angle and saturated colors. Kind of makes me wonder if that ’style’ is ‘in’ right now. Do videography and photography go through different trends, kind of like fashion?

I’ve been looking at buying a suitcase for my trip home. The thing with shopping for luggage is that the price range/quality is so great. I mean, you can buy a $10 suitcase, or a $300. That’s a pretty big spread. So how’s a girl to know how much she should spend? In the past, I’ve usually just bought cheap luggage because I figure I use it a couple of times a year so it doesn’t need to be super sturdy. But now I’m finding that the cheap luggage’s cheapness is showing through the wear. So I’ve been thinking of spending a little more money, and like anything I spend money on, I gotta do some research. I found this helpful article, What sort of bag should you buy?, about carry on luggage because I’m thinking of getting a carry on suitcase. I think it would suit my needs well, I’ve got to take a laptop and DSLR home and obviously that can’t go in a checked suitcase and if I have them in their own respective bags, that eats up all my carry on baggage allowance right there. Plus I’m thinking I’ll spend a week or so in December going around Austria, and maybe Germany, and maybe something small with wheels would be nice.

I went and looked at some luggage this afternoon at Loft. I still find it hard to tell the difference between a $100 suitcase and a $200 one. Will have to keep looking. Google search pointed me to an apparent discount store nearby in Sannomiya that I was not aware of, I’m going to have to check out this DonkiKingdom place.

Yesterday I cooked this strange looking vegetable. It’s called goya and it’s a Japanese vegetable from Okinawa. I’d seen it at the grocery store and wondered what it was, and how it was prepared. To my surprise and delight, I found it in a dish in the set meal I had at Mikoan in Kyoto, and also to my surprise I discovered it’s got something of an acquired taste (it’s quite bitter). But I didn’t let that put me off, and when I found this vegetarian recipe for goya champuru, I decided to try cooking it. I guess the bitterness has to be countered by some sweetness and eating it with rice definitely helps. It was fun to take pictures of though.

Ever since my trip to Australia, I’ve been really conscious of the dust on the sensor of my digital camera. Although until I read this DSLR cleaning page, to me it was dust somewhere inside my camera, but now thanks to the guide I know it’s on the sensor.

Today I went into Osaka to go to Yodobashi (I seriously love that store and really I could find what I need here in Kobe, but I just like going there), to buy a bulb blower and to my great joy, I actually ended up being able to pay with it with points, and I found out that I have like 2000 worth of points to use still. Which may not seem like a lot but whatever, that’s like $20 worth of free stuff. Woo hoo to that! So the point is, if you’re going to be in Japan for a while, pick one big electronics store (since as far as I can tell they all seem to offer points) for your electronic needs and buy your stuff there and collect and enjoy the points. Although you should still shop around, especially for camera stuff, because the big electronics stores aren’t always the cheapest, and the little camera shops can have pretty good prices. What I usually do is a run a search on kakaku.com for what I’m looking to buy and use the cheapest price as a guideline for ‘good deal’. Then I’ll compare the price at Yodobashi. If it’s a lot more (more than the % I’d get in points which I look at as kind of like a discount) I’ll check the smaller camera shops, like a camera shop in Kobe where I bought my fish-eye lens for a good price or Tokiwa Camera in Osaka’s Den Den Town, which offered me a good price (and great service) on my DSLR.

However, a giant electronics store like Yodobashi is a great place to shop for things like a camera bag, where personal preference plays a big part and a large (and I mean Large!) selection is important.

A while back treehugger posted about a pedal roller coaster in Japan. So I set out to do some internet sleuthing to figure out where it was exactly, and discovered it to be Washuzan Highland Park in Okayama, which isn’t too far from where I am by shinkansen, and I resolved to go because come on! It looked too funny not to! That said, I wouldn’t call it a roller coaster, really more of funny pedal powered carts on a high metal tracks, giving breathtaking views of the sea and the island of Shikoku. But it was still pretty fun.

EDIT I would like to say that getting that video up on youtube was a headache and a half. And for some reason the first part of the video wouldn’t work. I kept uploading the clip to youtube and it kept saying ‘failed’. I have no idea why and it was really aggravating coz the first clip was the best one! So I gave up.Ha, that’s my problem, I just can’t give up when something isn’t working. I gave up on YouTube though. YouTube, you suck. Last night it wasn’t letting me upload, so I decided to just try later, and today it was still giving me grief. So I posted half of what I wanted to originally, because it wouldn’t accept my first clip. Anyway, Jumpcut, you rock. I uploaded everything no fuss no muss. It was super easy for me to put the clips together and publish the video and share it. Great intuitive user interface. And I could even have added music if I wanted to!

My main problem is that my camera records video in Quicktime format (.mov), and most of the time I take lots of shot little clips, which I want to stitch together into one movie to share with friends or post on my site. I’m not all hardcore into making movies or anything, I just don’t want my friends to have to download 3 separate clips when it would be so much easier just to send them one. Unfortunately Windows Movie Maker, which comes with Windows doesn’t support .mov files. I guess if I had a Mac this wouldn’t be a problem, but that’s beside the point. The point is I searched and searched for some easy reliable freeware that would let me string a few clips together and didn’t have much luck. I figured there had to be an easier way, so after digging through YouTube, I saw I could use their ‘remixer’. Well that was crap and a waste of time. Basically, Jumpcut solved my problem and now I’m happy. No need to download software or anything to edit .mov files, just upload them to Jumpcut, play around and then share the video. Easy peasy. /EDIT

After hearing that there was a hair salon in Sannomiya where the hairdresser spoke english, I googled and googled to try and find a website with a map, to no avail. Finally my friend remembered to bring their card in for me, and there was a website all along! Hair Studio Billy. So I made an appointment and got my hair cut the other day. They did a good job, and it wasn’t too expensive. And there’s a really cute friendly little dog named Billy. Too bad I only found out about them now that I’m leaving.

last week-end i went to Koyasan with some friends. despite the fact that the weather was complete crap (we were there right as a typhoon was hitting the area) and it rained cats and dogs the whole week-end, i have to say that it’s one my favourite places i’ve visited in japan so far.

Koyasan is up in the mountains in the prefecture of Wakayama, and the journey there was great. we took a train that wound its way up the mountain, going through beautiful lush forests and passing small villages perched on steep hills. the last leg of the journey consisted of taking a steep cable car up the mountain, which was quite the experience.

we stayed in one of the many temples open to tourists, which was a really great experience. one of the highlights was getting to try shojin ryori, which is vegetarian buddhist cuisine. our stay included dinner (pictured) and breakfast. (although i suspected the package of dried nori seaweed included in the breakfast was not vegetarian so i didn’t eat it, it’s been my experience that a lot of those little packs of snack nori aren’t vegetarian because they somehow add shrimp to them).

my favourite part about Koyasan was walking through the cemetary, i just wish it hadn’t been raining so hard.

using the happy cow vegetarian restaurant directory i found a (new to me) restaurant in kyoto that i decided to check out. it’s called mikoan, and while it was a little tricky to find, it was well worth it. it’s in a pretty central location, just south of Shijo St, not too far from Hankyu Kawaramachi station. the food was of course delicious (in the photo curry rice on the left and set on the right), and i’ll definitely be going back next time i’m in the area. the pictures on the website definitely helped me to find it. in fact, it’s so hard to find that i just read on the vegan japan blog that a couple of tourists were unable to find it even with the help of local police. guess i was lucky to find it indeed.

The last few days have involved going all over Kansai. Today we went to the Kyoto Studio Park Toei Uzumasa Eigamura. We dressed in yukatas (picked up cheaply and on impulse yesterday at a Uniqlo near Kyoto Station) and got half-off admission. The park was pretty neat, it was fun to poke our heads into all kinds of traditional style Japanese buildings. Unfortunately they weren’t filming anything today so we didn’t get to see any of that. But it was still fun to check out the park and I’m glad we went. Then we headed over the to Nishijin Textile Center and caught the Kimono Show and admired beautiful textiles.

After that we headed over to Gion because my friend wanted to check it out. While walking around the narrow streets, it was uncanny how many tourists kept snapping pictures of us in our yukatas.  My friend kept wanting to tell everyone “We’re not real!” as in, we’re just just tourists too! Throughout the day we also noticed lots of old Japanese ladies would look us up and down and smile at us. Maybe they were happy to see young folk in yukatas? Anyway, it was a pretty interesting experience to see how people will react differently to you just based on what you are wearing. And of course it was fun to get to wear a yukata for a day. I had no idea how to put it on, or tie the obi. But I followed the picture directions included with mine, as well as these useful videos and we were on our way.