Category: photography

Another [confusion.cc] trip [confusion.cc] to Japan in the middle of winter. More specifically a trip to Kyoto.

This trip was precipitated by a visit by my mother and sister to Singapore to see my daughter. Since their flight was via Tokyo, they decided to take a stopover and visit the land of the rising sun, a new destination for them to check off. Candice, Tori and I decided to join them.

Even though the flight was to Tokyo we spent the whole trip, sans train rides to and from Narita airport, in and around Kyoto. This was my planning—Kyoto has the highest density of places to see. And while I’d like to see stuff I’ve never had the chance to see it made sense for my mother and sister to see the ‘must see’ sites in Kyoto on their first trip. It also made sense to go to some place I was familiar with to make it easier to get around with Tori. So Kyoto it was.

We only had 5 days, so we focused on the big must see sites: Nijo-jo [wikipedia.org] the Shogun home, Ginkaku-ji [wikipedia.org] the Silver Pavilion and Kinkaku-ji [wikipedia.org] the Golden Pavilion. Fushimi Inari-taisha [wikipedia.org] and Kiyomizu-dera [wikipedia.org].

In addition to temple and shrine hopping, we spent our evenings wondering the streets of Gion [wikipedia.org] where we spotted not one, but two Geisha. We spotted both Geisha on the same night walking along one of the tea house lined streets. In fact as Tori was playing in a small water fixture next to a door we almost got run over by one of the Geisha when she came out of the door on her way somewhere. No pictures of Geisha though, it was dark and flashing people in the face is not something I am good at.

It was a good trip with the family, Tori had a lot of fun and I have a lot of photos of her. But overall I did not take a lot of good photos. The winter weather and focus on Tori were not conducive to taking photos. I took a lot of snapshots but few turned into good photos. There is defiantly a bent towards good photos in the morning, less time and attention to the shots as the day went on. Still, I did take a lot of shots and some turned out good.

You can see the whole Kyoto, Japan, January 2010 photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].

I have visited Malacca [wikipedia.org] before but only took a few photos, because I was only there for a few hours. This time I was there overnight but I still didn’t have time to explore much other then the Chinese district and Stadthuys Square [wikipedia.org]. The problem is the drive up and back takes so long. I don’t think exploring Malacca should take more than a couple of days but that means staying a few nights when you factor in the drive and the oppressive sun and heat. Anyway, maybe I’ll make it back one day.

Malacca’s Chinatown, if you can call it that, fascinates me because it is what Singapore was or would be if not for the Singapore Governments intervention. The Peranakan culture filling the falling-down, left-over colonial era “Shophouses” [wikipedia.org]. On almost everything that could count the modernized Singapore has Malacca beat, but Malacca does retain an air of history which Singapore has lost with the leveling and fixing-up of the shophouses.

Click on the photos to see the whole Malacca, Malasysia, October 2009 photoset on Flickr [flickr.com].