what is up

Well, it’s been about two months since I wrote anything here, and it’s been quite a whirlwind two months. And now I find myself in the middle of a chilly winter, which has just become gloomy and rainy. It was nice and pleasant with the blue skies and mild days — I’d hoped the sunshine would stick around longer. At least the tomato plants will like this rain.

Just thought I’d do a random catch-up post in the stream-of-consciousness style because I can’t be bothered planning and structuring this neatly.

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potatoes, cold mornings and bridges

We’re approaching the final stretch of my month of haiku now, and I’m feeling like I could actually continue this beyond July. Imagine how many haiku I could write in all the life ahead of me?

What I’ve started to worry about, however, is that I’m going to repeat certain themes, lines or phrases from one haiku to another. I actually pondered this back on July 11th, and wrote this piece:

How many haiku,
Already written, and still…
Many more waiting

Is it possible to exhaust all possible compositions of these three-line poems? With such finite syllables, surely you could only do so much?

Mt Fuji & Aokigahara

When KF and I were planning our trip to Japan, I asked her if there was anywhere in particular she wanted to go, or anything she really wanted to see/do there. You’d be forgiven for thinking that I’m about to say Mt Fuji was top of the list (or on the list at all) but there was only one place she was set on going to, and that wasn’t it.

Well, not exactly. The place she wanted to visit is actually on Mt Fuji, so it inadvertently ended up at the top of the list.

Otaru pt 2 – Snow Light Path Festival

As much as I enjoyed our day trip to Otaru, I never thought that I’d get so many blog posts out of this humble little town. I’ve already posted an abridged summary of our daytime wanderings, and posted some of the lovely doors I found. There will be a second Thursday Doors post for Otaru coming up in the near future, whenever I find time to put it together, but, in the meanwhile, I wanted to share some photos from one of the highlights of that day: Otaru’s Snow Light Path.

I kind of don’t want to write a lot here; I have so many photos from that night to share instead. (I will try to restrict myself a little, though) 

Asahikawa pt 1 – Asahiyama Zoo

I’ve lived my whole life in Australia, in a place that doesn’t snow. Growing up, I’d watch American movies and TV shows (and probably some British ones too), and always see those stereotypical scenes of children waking up to snow (usually on or around Christmas), and I’d think how wonderful that would be (on any day of the year). So you can probably imagine my delight, on the morning February 7th (yes, these posts are taking a lot longer than I’d originally foreseen), when I peered out the window of our Sapporo hotel, and saw flurries of glorious snow falling from the sky!

The snow continued to fall quite heavily as we left our hotel and made our way to Susukino Station. I could not take the smile from my face. (I was probably also still on a high from the Sapporo Snow Festival the day before.)

Thursday Doors – the streets of Sapporo

I’m sad that this will probably be the last of my Sapporo posts, but I’m also pretty excited about sharing all these photos. Sapporo is a wonderful city (I think so, anyway), and it was delightful to explore and wander through the city’s streets (even if my snow boots were starting to give me a bit of pain…)