taxis' and traffic lights'

am curious to see where tokyo would rank among top cities in the world if one were to count the number of traffic lights over a given perimeter, especially through residential areas. with almost 2/3rds of the working population prefer underground trains for commuting, this not an issue for them. add to the fact that taxis are awfully expensive here in tokyo. foreigners like me who prefer taxis for a shorter ride has to experience the stop/start of these taxis due caused by incessant traffic lights that bleeds your wallet. taxi drivers are not complaining. they wish they had more.

i don't live in a room!

if you are alone and living in japan, chances are that the place that you are living will be called a 'room', no matter what size it is and how many rooms there are. but if you live with your family, even if its a room, it would be called as a home. i did some scrounging on the japanese language so if the language and translation has something to do with this understanding and it did. in their language 'room' does mean a living place for single person and home is where a family live. but, i certainly dont live in a room.

rare sight in tokyo

i spent most of my life in a tropical country with just about one season all through the year - summer with flashes of rain. while the idea of snow was there, snow itself had to be in simulated domes or theme parks with artificial snow machines.
to see roads, trees, buildings, cars and bikes covered with snow on a sunday morning in tokyo was a sight to behold. cup of hot tea, listening to my favourite music looking outside the window - cant have a perfect sunday than this.
something about the white of the snow that amazes me. its purity. its serenity. its grains. beautiful. this pic does not do justice to the beauty - just as a bookmark to your imagination.

time took a break!

my train from tokyo took me to kyoto in a little over than two hours - a distance of 514km - its the bullet train. sure enough, its a bullet train. this was my first trip to kyoto. there was no shortage of people giving me their views on kyoto. you cant avoid having a sketch in your head before you set your foot there. hear say can do that to you, we even have a picture of moon.
i landed in kyoto on a bitter cold night with winds flapping violently. i didn't want to stay in a hotel in kyoto - so, scrouged the net to find a quirky accomodation - and i did. i made my way from the station to the temple where i was staying through local train. when i reached the temple, there was hardly any one to greet you but that's what i had expected. so, it was a perfect start to my kyoto trip. i was shown to my room by the caretaker in the temple. very well done up room with cozy bed and a clean toilet - this was always going to decide where i was going to stay. no tv. no room service. no phones. harldy any signal for my mobile devices. for once, i wanted to live without those peices of instruments which i felt was in control of me.
made my way to the main road to grab some dinner. surprisingly kyoto was easier to manage without japanese than tokyo. well, come to think of it, it wasn't a surprise since kyoto had learnt to live with more tourists that made them speak english.
went back to bed thinking about my next three days.
i dont want to make this a travel diary. what i really wanted to document was the beauty of kyoto and how it had to offer such great things in all 4 seasons. temples, palaces, streets, cafes - all had shades of history going back some 1000 years. and how its all preserved. i truly felt, time took a break. if time can, you should definitely do!

vend it!

technology in japan is more like an elastic, they stretch as far as it could be and still keep with in its expandable territory. vending machine technology is one such. there is no limit to what can be bought out of a vending machine. hot tea, cold tea, burgers, sandwiches, muffins, disposable rain coats, re-usable umbrella - this list can go on till dawn.
when you are on road in japan, you may not find a bin to litter but sure you would find a vending machine that could vend a surprise!

akira

Kurosawa Akira - I am not going to say anything more than what is already been said about him. Lengends like John Ford, Satyjit Ray, Ingmar Bergman, George Lucas considered Kurosawa to be the greatest ever to have weilded the camera.

Born on March 23, 1910 - youngest of 8 - he went through a difficult childhood. Charlie Chaplin like. Greatly influenced by the war and the great kanto earthquake - AK decided to write about these things that left people to believe he was a communist. He didn't know what he was, to say the truth. This blog entry is to show how AK was in love with Nature.

Nature played a great deal in his movies - the heavy rain in the opening scene of Rashomon, heavy rain again in the final battle in Seven Samurai, the intense heat in Stray Dog, the cold wind in Yojimbo, the snow in Ikiru, and the fog in Throne of Blood. AK also liked using frame wipes sometimes cleverly hidden by motion within the frame, as a transition device.

"I like unformed characters. This may be because, no matter how old I get, I am still unformed myself"

calming influence...

This a temple that you could see right out of the window from my office here in tokyo and the back of the temple leads to a graveyard. There are numerous tombstones in a small space. space management is something you can learn from Japanese constructions. This temple, for me, has in many ocassions has had a calming influence. 30-min session with myself after lunch on a spring afternoon - I wouldn;t trade anything for that.