Holiday snaps

Hi all. I realised that my last few posts, apart from sounding rather bitter and twisted, didn’t feature any pictures at all, which is a shame. So here are a few photos from a couple of weeks back when my mother and sisters were visiting (which already feels like months ago…).

One of the first things I did was to take them to Cafe Hoxton about 15 mins down the road for a coffee. This place is a jazz-inspired and they have little sculptures out on the terrace, like this one:

Isn’t that just the coolest thing?

Then we proceeded onto Takehara, another 10 mins down the road. In this excellent photo of the streetscape taken by Sister Rose (none of mine worked out), it looks like a Ye Olde Worlde exhibit at a fun park, but it’s actually a living breathing town with real life animatronic people in it. Hard to believe we only stumbled on Takehara by accident a few months ago. Which just goes to show the value of the occasional aimless Sunday drive when you’re in a different country.

Another day I took Sister Liz and my mother up to the Buttsuji temple complex, one of my favourite spots in these parts, where I discovered an audience of stone Buddhas that I hadn’t noticed the first time. (Amazing what you see when you haven’t got the kids in tow.)

Click here for more Buttsuji photos.

Rose the Cruise Director took the family on a trip to Matsue to see some museum in Matsue on the other side of the country. It only took three hours, since Japan is quite skinny down our end. The museum has a stunning garden attached. Here is the evidence:

Another day she took Sister Liz off to Kyoto where they saw this garden:

Boy did they get good value out of their Japan Rail Passess. Tragically the Sushi on a Stick household isn’t allowed to buy them as we don’t have tourist visas, otherwise I would have been to all these exotic places too… But at least we got some photos, if indirectly, and I thought I should put them in this post, even though it’s technically immoral since I wasn’t actually there.

Meanwhile, Grandma was keen to see her grandkids in action at a Real Japanese School. Unfortunately we couldn’t get a suitable time to see Felix’s class, but I was able to sneak her in to brass band practice one day, where we discovered Ruby has managed to master the trumpet pretty well:

This next one is after the family had gone home but I’m going to chuck it in here anyway. Last Sunday Ruby had a match up at Fuchu in the mountains, and I embarrassed her severely by insisting on a team photo, though as you can see nobody seemed to mind too much. See if you can spot the one girl NOT doing a peace sign. What a rebel!