I haven’t posted in my sounds category for a while. Time to fix that. There are a few recordings on my phone that are worth posting. This one is self explanatory. Few people would have guessed it looking at my Dad during my lifetime but he served in the Navy. He even did a tour on a ship in Vietnam. He was discharged for medical reasons, a form or arthritis that was never definitively identified but the pain it caused him was a major contributing factor in his other health issues as he got older and more and more sedentary.
When he died in 2017 we managed to get a flag guard from the local Naval Reserve Centre to attend the funeral and perform the flag folding and play taps. I snuck in a recording of taps. I’ve always liked taps played on a single bugle. Not sure where I first heard it, probably a Donald Duck cartoon or a Loony Toons.
10 years ago, in March 2004 I visited Japan for the first time. One of the stop on that trip was Matsumoto, in Nagano prefecture. We didn’t spend much time there – one afternoon and the night. I really only remember three things from my first visit:
How cold it was in Matsumoto-jo, one of the few original castles still standing in Japan, where we had to remove our shoes as we walked up to the top, everyone had frozen toes and it was snowing when we left
A used Kimono shop on Nakamachi-dori, where we spent a long time browsing the beautiful kimonos
The sound of the recorded woman announcing arrival in Matsumoto on the train as it pulled into the station
Ten years later, in February 2014, I visited Matsumoto again. The goal was to go somewhere where my daughters could see snow. Turns out Matsumoto was not really a good choice as it apparently does not get that much snow. We used Matsumoto as a home base to and went to Kambayashi Onsen in Yamanouchi — famous for its snow monkeys as well as seeing Zenkō-ji in Nagano and taking a bus to Hida-Takayama for an afternoon.
Matsumoto is an even quieter town than I remember and the early sunsets a late sunrises of winter made it seem ever quieter. But some things don’t change:
Even though it was quiet, we all enjoyed ourselves; my wife had a good time eating, including horse sashimi and more soba then you can shake a limp buckwheat noodle at. We took advantage of my mom and sister being with us to leave my daughters with them in the evening so we could go out and try different restaurants since my wife is really the only adventurous foodie in the group. My daughters enjoyed the soba too but their favorite things were ham from Lawson’s and the popcorn from 7-11.
As for snow, we got some in Yamanouchi when we hiked up to see the snow monkeys and we drove through a lot on the way to Hida-Takayama but none in Matsumoto until the last morning. On the last morning we got a lot of snow we had to catch a train at 10AM but we know the forecast was for early snow. So I woke up at 5AM and sure enough there was about 10cm on the ground. I woke Tori up and we walked to the castle to take some photos and play for an hour or so.
I started uploading some of the tracks I have recorded with the Voice Memo application on my iPhone to SoundCloud a while ago. Just have not gotten around to posting the links here. Mostly I use the Voice Memo application to record my daughter, but I started recording some stuff while I travel too, and even some random things in Singapore. As with my photos the sounds that I publicly release are CC’ed under the attribution license 3.0 [creativecommons.org].
