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The night before our trip to Thailand, we visited Ebisu to check out the lights. There was a nice crescent moon on that night a couple weeks ago, and Mt. Fuji could be seen as well (although it is a bit obscured by clouds in the above photo).
We are back from our Thailand vacation now, and I’ll start blogging that trip beginning tomorrow.
Meiji Jingu is to the right. Yoyogi Park is just past the trees. I don’t think this shot would have come out as well with my TZ7. I used my LX3 for this one.
Mt. Fuji sunset from Shinjuku (Tokyo, Japan – November 3, 2009)
On a recent, extremely clear sky day, after rain and wind, I went to the top of Shinjuku to watch the sun set. It was marvelous. And yes, that is Mt. Fuji (in the upper right part of the photo) from Tokyo. The sun set on one side of the building and then…
The moon rose over the other side of Shinjuku…
And then the people came out to play…
My second Japanese baseball game of the 2009 season was my first in central Tokyo. The place was Meiji Jingu Stadium (明治神宮野球場) which is almost walking distance from my apartment. My daughter and I took the train instead of making the 40 minute or so walk.
The sunset was beautiful, even with countless beer girls jumping in front of the camera. The number of beer girls at Jingu was staggering. I have been to many, many baseball games in more than a dozen parks in three countries and have never seen anything like it. The ratio of fans to beer vendors was probably about 10:1.
Like our experience in Chiba, we were on the big screen within minutes of our arrival. Unlike the games I’ve been to in Tokorozawa and Chiba, there were lots of foreigners at the Swallows’ game. At those other games it seemed we were the only foreigners among tens of thousands of Japanese. At the Swallows’ game, perhaps as much as 1% of the crowd was not Japanese.
I visited Enoshima (江ノ島) for the first time during my second trip to Kamakura. I arrived at about 4 p.m. to see the sights and take in the sunset. Strangely, as the weather was perfect and the skies were clear, nearly everyone was leaving the island. After walking up hundreds of stairs I reached the top and began my descent to the back side of the island. Although there was space (and restaurants with stunning views) for thousands of tourists only a few of us were there; half were fishing.
How a place (稚児ヶ淵, chigogabuchi) with such an incredible sunset could be so deserted on a warm, Friday evening in September with a population of 15+ million living less than an hour away baffled me. I didn’t complain though. The experience, like many sunsets, seemed surreal. Many of the restaurants mentioned above sat completely empty or were closed. Either this place is something of a secret or the numbers change dramatically on the weekend.
The giant hawks at this place (photos coming here soon) were a welcome change from the typical sea gulls at places like this around the world.
I have a few decent pictures from our day in Washington D.C. this past summer that I’ll put up here from time to time. The above is of the magnificent sunset from our hotel room. We didn’t realize until the next day (since it was an unplanned trip that happened only because we missed our flight to Copenhagen) that we weren’t really in Washington D.C. at all. We were in Virginia.