Joy Pop Sound with custom rims

Here’s my baby. It’s a Suzuki “Joy Pop Sound”. No joke. And check out the fly custom hubcaps I’m sporting. I’m thinking about just painting them hot pink!

I went to Kochi City yesterday to see a movie.  My plan was to check out Blood Diamond, but I had an old schedule and it wasn’t playing until that night, so instead I saw Babel with Brad Pitt, etc.  Now I think the name should have cued me in that there might be more than just English spoken in the movie, but…  So, the movie is in equal parts English, Spanish, Japanese and Arabic and in Japan there are Japanese subtitles only.  It was quite an adventure.  Since I paid 1800 yen to see it I thought I’d do my best.  I could get the gist of the Spanish and catch a few words of the Japanese but I had to rely on the Japanese subtitles for the Arabic parts.  That was fun.  Even though I understood less than half of the dialogue in the movie it was still a great film, but I think I’ll try to download it in English.

Todai-ji and The Daibutsu

This is the world’s largest wooden building (or so I’m told) which houses one of the world’s largest bronze statues. They’re situated in Nara Park and constitute one of the biggest tourist destinations in Japan. It’s truly a breathtaking sight and a camera just can’t adequately capture the scale.

Throughout the park there are herds of sickly reindeer that follow tourist around for “deer cookies” which are sold at stands that look something akin to hotdog stands. At first I thought it was pretty cool, but after an hour of smelling deer shit and having these mangy creatures follow me around trying to get at the crackers in my bag I wasn’t so keen.

Balcony shots

For a while I was taking one picture from my balcony every day. Here are some of the nicer ones.

Cape Ashizuri and Giant Spider

Here’s a few pictures of Cape Ashizuri, the southern tip of Shikoku island. This is a really beautiful place and is fairly famous within Japan.  One of the Sacred 88 temples of Shikoku is located here, and they say the cape was the point of departure for those seeking Fudaraku, the sacred land of Kannon, the Shinto goddess of mercy.  It’s also a popular place to commit suicide.