konnichi wa

Yep, Japan again.

I'll quickly skip over the long flight (11:00 hours) and the jetlag (yes, I have it), to come to the good bits.

A) The weather: Since I've arrived here it's been sunny and comfortable. Yes it's sort of cold (after all, it's winter here, too) but not too bad really, and almost no wind.

B) Food: Yummy. One example lunch today

First, though, you have to tackle the menue.

Many restaurants in Japan have picture menues and also often have some sort of examples of what they have to offer in form of a plastic model. Sad to say, this restaurant didn't. Luckily one of my collegues is bi-lingual (English / Japanese), so he helped us to get what we wanted.

I wanted Udon soup (with tempura)




C) History: We went to visit Matsumoto, which is famous for its castle.


400 years old and in an excellent condition (it never saw a battle, though, even though it was as a fortress originally). To protect the indoor floors, every visitor gets a pair of slippers and they have to carry their outdoor shoes in a plastic bag with them. I don't know why we got nicer slippers then the rest, but well, we did. Maybe because we were obviously foreigners.



D) Knitting: This time I opted for not taking any cross stitch, but concentrate instead on some knitting. So I took a skein of Rowan kidsilk haze and started on a fancy little scarf.


I already pretty much doubled the length from the one in this pictures on the (long) train ride back.

So, tomorrow I'll go to Tokyo for some shopping (electronics, maybe another lens for my camera and, if I can find it, some yarn)

Roses are Red ... and White, and Yellow

This is going to be a very flower and picture heavy post.

About 3 miles from where I live is a smallish castle called Schloss Wolfsgarten. Normally you can't visit there, as it's private porperty, but on two weekends in May the gates are open and you can go in and visit the lovely park and look at the castle (though only from the outside). The family that owns the castle is related to the British queen and I've heard that she actually stayed in Wolfsgarten a couple of times while she was visiting Germany (though probably before I moved here).
The gartens are famous for the rhododendron that's growing there, though this year most of the blooming season is already over, and only a few bushes still had fresh blossoms.

Now, for some pictures:

The small lake in the park with the bridge (reminded me of pictures by VanGogh)


Somebody living in the lake



Nymphaea


Rhododendron



And, (for the title of this post for today) some roses





As you can see, I've given my new camera a bit of a workout and I'm really, really happy how the pictures turned out.


Update on the stitching front:

Medieval Tiles - I skipped one of the smaller squares as I've decided to use the recommended GAST Midnight thread after all. I've ordered it, now I have to wait for it to arrive.



As I've got the next week off - *yeah*- I've got back to King Tut. I hope to make quite some progress on him over the next couple of days (though, I've got loads of other stuff planed ...)