Better late than never, more reflections on wondrous Japan.

Restaurants provide hot towels to wash yourself with before you eat. On hot days restaurants give you a chilled wet towel to wash yourself with before you eat. Thank you so much lovely Lucky Garden on Ikoma Mountain.  Quiet streets. 

Loud streets. Patient traffic. There are people whose job it is just to safely direct traffic (pedestrian, bike, and car) in and out of busy shopping centres, and around even small construction jobs.  So nice. (And they're not paying off-duty police officers some ridiculous amount as in Ontario.)

 

There are Shinto shrines on busy street corners.

 

  There is cold beer in vending machines - for about a dollar fifty.  Nice!  Clean toilets everywhere - even in the subway. White egrets in green rice paddies. Frogs, tree frogs. Crayfish.  Rice paddies between apartment buildings.

Hot springs and bathing.  Mountain paths with cicadas thrumming. Efficient, abundant, amazing transit. 

 

At the check-out, the delightful packing stations with newspaper, tape, string, etc. in grocery stores and 100 Yen shops (dollar stores). 

 Bowing. Tea.  Fresh, edible, affordable lunches at the convenience stores.  Small cool trucks.  Push-button service in restaurant.  No tipping.  Bicycles.  Bicycle parking under wisteria covered pergolas.  Manners.  The formal two-handed presenting and accepting of business cards.

  

Sleeping on tatami mats.

Young women's fun fashions.  Flower arranging.  Blue tile roofs. Grey tile roofs in the rain.

Gardens.  Big gardens, little gardens.  Planter gardens.

 Koi in blue and white ceramic bowls on doorsteps.  Heated toilet seats.  Toilets that clean and dry your bottom. Mountains.Stairways on the outsides of huge apartment buildings.

Temples. Bodhisattva.  (Thank you Steely Dan.) 

  Buddha.

 Wonderful people. People who love fun.  Kind and loving people. 

 

                                                         Shoe lockers in restaurants.

And the endless varieties of food.  Fish, salads, sea vegetables, noodles, dumplings, more fish. Raisins on pizza.  Octopus dumplings, your choice of sauce.  Daikon, burdock, bitter cucumber.  French pastries.  Japanese pizza.  Italian restaurants.  Japanese Beer.

Women-only subway cars in Osaka. 

 

Osaka! Parasols.Heat. Wearing a towel all day, every day because it is so hot and humid (37 C). "Love" hotels. Guest slippers.  Uniforms. And as your plane backs out of the gate, the people working on the runway bow to you.

Sayanara & good bye dear Japan.