I went to Osaka last weekend, partly for business reason, partly for fun. Despite the crazy heat (mounting up to 40C) I had a lot of fun indeed. right now I’m just too tired to write. So lets have a look at some close-up shots I did, kind of like a riddle (people who know Osaka can guess where I ‘ve been).The last picture is actually a so called hdr-shot (for “high dynamic range”), which is composed of three pictures with different exposures.
2007.08.14: Updated today again!
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I made a new page (“simon’s keitai page”, upper right blue tab) on this blog, where I will periodically publish some interesting pictures.
Of course we celebrated the Swiss National holiday with a firework. No actually we should not call it firework because it is beyond every firework you ever saw in Switzerland. Let’s call it like the Japanese do “hanabi” (which means flower and fire; feuerblume).
Japanese love hanabi and therefore you’ll find in August in the whole country lots of hanabi festivals sponsored by big companies.
If you plan to visit a hanabi you should go there by time…which means around noon (remember the early sunrise/sunset) the hanabi starts after 7pm. If you get there early, the train won’t be that crowded, and you should get a chance to find some green lawn which is not yet covered by a blue vinyl sheet. Japanese carry for festivals all the time a blue vinyl sheet, lots of beer, sake, food and crackers.
By the time the hanabi starts everybody is in a very frolic mood. The hanabi itself is gigantic and breathtaking and takes you for over an hour to a different world. A kind of game during the hanabi, is to guess what you see in the sky. We saw flowers, butterflies, bears and even glasses…And the japanese are not as shy and reserved as you might think they are. They are shouting, screaming and clapping their hands with lots of enthusiasm.
But as soon the spectacel is over most of the people are leaving the scene immediately. They try to catch the train as soon as possible, but there are thousands of people with the same idea…so it takes you ages to get to the train station…to the platform and then inside the train, you will be lucky if you have enough space to move your arms.
Please remember that it is humid and hot during these days!
At festivals you can see many Japanese wearing the traditional cloth called Yukata. Actually they have different patterns for different festivals. Hanabi yukatas like the black one in the picture are my favorite!
Sorry for the bad quality but I was a bit in a hurry
We are back from our breakout-trip to Inawashiro-ko.
Romana finished her internship last Friday and Simon will start the internship at the Swiss Business Hub tomorrow 2nd of August. Lucky him he got his first day at work off as it is the Swiss national holiday.
We are also famous to take every chance to breakout from BIG Tokyo to discover a new part from Japan. Our destinations have most of the time one major thing in common. NATURE!
We found a nice lake (the 4th biggest in Japan) called Inawashiroko and wanted to camp there. How do you find a camping place, if there is no local homepage in English. Romana’s guess enter “Camping Japan” in Google…Simon was laughing and said you also could enter “Camping planet Earth”. Romana was right and we found a camping spot right at the lake and according to our new friends (see pictures) it is the most beautiful in this area!
The weather was unfortunately not nice at all. A taifun hit the island once more and we had some rain…lucky us we found new friends and could join them visiting an onsen (hot spring) and spent some hours drinking Japanese sake (also very important if you want to discover Japanese traditions;-) and had a lots of fun.
legend (left-right):
1. romana & simon gazing at a mirror in aizu-wakamatsu
2. romana watching the town from the castle-walls
3. aizu-wakamatsu castle (tsuruga-jo)
4. camping ground at night
5. & 6. simon, romana, mai and tomo
7. mr. shacho himself :-)
