Flowers in the sun

Big field of green.... Sweden in summer

Flowers everywhere. Soft and fresh.

Everywhere.

A veterinary. I liked the statue outside of a Cocker Spaniel. This is where I used to take my cat. It is almost neighbour with the hotel I live in.

Ye old company

Just a couple of pictures from Sony Ericsson, pride of Lund. This is the new building.

Here are the meatballs I had for lunch at the public restaurant in the new Sony Ericsson building. Nice, big and juicy....yummmm

Picture of interior of the new building, taken from the entrance at the reception. Very very interesting and dynamic architecture.

The old building is not so bad neither. I really like the edges and the round middle part.

Swedish nature and stuff

I happen to be in Lund this week, on business trip. It is pretty crappy weather even for Swedish summer. But despite that, there is so much beauty that I had forgotten about. Here is the view from my hotel room.

OK, not a swedish nature picture, but i took it in the sun.

More green. This one I took 5.30 in the morning. You can see a couple of hares if you zoom in. The hare closest to me ran away real quick.

More early morning pictures. I couldn't sleep so I took a walk around.

Birds singing, the grass smell, everything was nice.

Leftovers

Here I am buying takoyaki at Kyoto station 8F or something

...And me posing in front of golden pavilion.

Where are the geishas?

So, we checked in at the ryokan, and asked the nice lady there "Where are these geishas and maikos that everyone talks about all the time?" and she told us exactly on which street we could find them. Also we learned that maikos and geishas could be distinguished by which lip they paint. Seriously. I think beginner maikos only paint their lower lip no pun intended. And the fully trained ones paint both lips red.

So we went out and started looking for that street. As you can see, the streets were pretty empty around that time.

Only people we could see were a couple of young girls with severe iron deficiency judging by their extremely pale faces.

So I asked them where that road is which the ryokan lady told us about. They had no idea.

Kyomizudera

Say cheese! I think while Martin was taking this one, he caught the attention of the couple of boys posing for their school trip photo.

We met some youngsters (I am not old. They were just younger than me.) who offered us free guide as long as they got to practice their English (By reading from a piece of paper) here they are posing with me.

If you look real carefully you can see me in the crowd. The blue dot.

Very beautiful this temple. Majestically rising above the tall trees. We could see it all the way from our ryokan balcony.

Inari Martin

The Inari gates were everywhere, and to actually walk them would take some serious effort, and time.

We just walked maybe around 1 km and called it quits, cause it started to look pretty much the same, once you saw the first couple of hundred meters.

I tried real hard to get this picture right, but failed. Martin caught it at a nice angle.

You are here. And as you can see the red tori roads lead pretty much everywhere in the nearby hills. This place is huge... I think at the bottom it says how long it takes to hike to different spots. 2 hours.. no way!

Martin's batch

Martin is a much better photographer than I am. And I am happy he took pictures of me with his camera. Anyway, the following posts are the Kyoto trip pictures which he took.

Peek-a-boo!

I think this was near Inari gates

And here I am firing up my camera to start a busy tourist day.

Kyoto Tower

Just before leaving Kyoto, waiting at the station we decided to pay the not so tall Kyoto Tower a visit. So we went up there and checked out the view, throughthe rain. We saw shinkansen and some temple and lots of other stuff.

And we took pictures with the mascot of Kyoto Tower. I think this was Tower Mama Chan.

And these are Mama-chan's baby-san

The Kyoto central station is enormous. I mean it is huuuuuge. And it reminded me of all the sci-fi movies I ever saw. Amazing. And huuuuge. We didn't even know that we were inside the station until the 3rd time or so...

Kinkaku-ji

Or the Golden Pavilion temple. We got tickets, although we actually knew that no one would check if we took the return route through the temple, without a ticket.

Le Pavilion d'or a la Gold with rooster and red wine sauce.

Even when rain was pouring down, it was beautiful.

The money god

Still in kinkakuji. It was a very nice trip all in all, and I had great time. I hope Martin enjoyed it as much.

Bye bye ryokan

The morning after, rain had started pouring down, but we didn't let it ruin our plans. We said bye to the nice people at the ryokan and took off towards the Golden Pavilion

Ponchoto

Last thing to do that day was to check in to our ryokan, and then take a walk out to see if we could find anything fun. And we did in Pontocho which is the bar district.

Narrow streets with geisha at night

At the dinner table in ryokan

And some more engrish from a bar menu that night. I like the fact that they handle their chicken every morning (!), and that you can order different species of chicken... Also we learned that we were sitting on 2nd floor, just in case we missed it when coming in.

Kiyomizydera

One part of kiyomizudera, with three jets of water running down. Each representing something (Love, Health and Money if I remember it right) and you have to pick one and pray. People standing in line to do just that. But I think I already have all three so I didn't line up.

This part is quite high up. The first thing Ayako told me when she heard I am going there was "Don't jump!"... I didn't intend to but I guess it is a pretty normal thing to do here.

Real nice view, real high up

View of the three jets part, from above...

If you look real close, you may see Martin.

Getting to Kiyomizudera

Next we went to one of the most popular temples in Kyoto, Kiyo-Mizu-Dera. On the way there, which was very very crowded, observant as we are, we found some engrish.

This is what the entrance looked like. On the left, some parts were under renovation...

Martin taking a break from all the walking. Kiyomizudera in the background.