Igirisu gin

Well, blogging is all well and good when you're living at home and working but travelling to exotic countries is not conducive to sitting in front of a screen and writing meaningless nothings. I kept an extensive journal during my travels and busted out my new Canon Powershot S80 so when I get home and find myself unemployed with nothing to do you can expect lots more meaningless nothings.

For now I'm back in Japan and absolutely loving it, great place to visit but bad place to work. Oh and its good to know that the rest of Japan is a lot more interesting than Yamaguchiken.

To celebrate the very, very rare event of sharing a day off with my girlfriend (first time since New Year) we decided to go on a little hiking trip and then finish the day off with a BBQ.

I was actually a little shocked by the variety of wildlife I got to see in the space of a couple of hours. We encountered a snake, a raccoon, numerous lizards and got to see some Japanese farmers at work. All very interesting. The plant life was pretty cool too, lots of new takenoko (bamboo shoots) and a small shitake (you know, those mushrooms) grove.

Anyway, lots of nice new pictures here, in the gallery section.

If you're interested in reading world news from an Asian perspective, there are a couple of decent English language newspapers including China Daily, despite being based in Beijing it seems to be fairly balanced. English language newspapers tend to get away with being a lot more critical than their native counterparts. Apart from the usual stories of Japan failing to give any compensation to Chinese forced labourers it also features a spiffy photo gallery, from which I have raided a rather low effort roundup of the week.

Top story has to be little Jian Bing, who despite being the tender age of four, has taken up smoking. His other past times include: hanging out with his dad and friends, cracking open a beer and occasionally soliticing the odd prostitute.

























The usual eclipse fever grips the world while Ehud Olmert becomes the new Israeli PM with promises to pull out of the West Bank, hopefully Hamas will play ball and stop blowing people up

Some geezer protests about beef, I would care if I wasn't top of the food chain and something was trying to eat me. But we are.

Fashion week in Sinagapore kicks off, something about balloons makes me feel good

John Howard and Tony Blair looking remarkably smug. Despite both being proven to be total liars and the recent news that Tony gave peerages in return for vast sums of money

Dubai continues its quest to build the most extravagant buildings in the world, this one will be the tallest in the world and is only part of a 500 acre development

This just looks cool.

So someone asked me if I'd seen 'Memoirs of a Geisha'? (Or 'Sayuri' here in Japan).

"A movie about Japan, filmed entirely in America, written by an American, starring Chinese actresses speaking English. No I haven't."

Geisha are pretty thin on the ground these days and the chance of seeing one perform is pretty slim, and costly. One glance at the trailer for Sayuri and you know its a piece of tosh. Pop video dance routines are not exactly what geisha are about, its about grace.

In fact I stumbled across some very rare live footage of geisha's performing their craft on Youtube today. So here is what its really like (if it doesn't load click on the link below):


link

Oh and full respect and credit to Mr Rob Pongi who captured this.

"one of Japan's three most scenic views" according to www.japan-guide.com which is obviously no stranger to the current obsession of ranking EVERYTHING UNTIL WE KNOW HOW GOOD EVERYTHING IN THE UNIVERSE IS.

But tis good to be true, a small island off the coast of Hiroshima, frequented by not very wild deer, monks and hoardes of day trippers. Its the home of the famous Itsukushima shrine and the big red floating torii which is prominently displayed on most Japanese guide books.

You can marvel at the ancient wonders, (most of which is rebuilt every year after it gets destroyed by a typhoon), walk through a splendid park and do the momiji (looking at autumn leaves) thing, eat fresh oysters and hike up a mountain populated with monkeys.

See lots of lovely photos here