Final morning here at the Renaissance and I'm treated to a dusting of snow. The New Town Central Park assumes a tiny frosted appearance. The flakes continue to fall as the city wakes up.
After 14 years, 600+ posts, thousands of photographs and stories that spanned 3 continents, it's time for me to part ways with Blogger. It all came down to formatting and style and the fact that I simply do not want to devote my time to learning more HTML coding than what I know today. The format of this blog was a challenge for me - sizing, colors, layout - all required me to go far outside my comfort zone but large extent I got what I wanted from it. But these last few trips I've just been unhappy with the results (in particular the ability to size and place photographs in a manner pleasing to my eye.) And the truth of it is, Blogger has stayed static while other platforms have automated the process to the point where its fairly easy to get what you want with canned tools versus writing code. To that end, we're off to WordPress. I've bought the domain, I've locked in a premium account and from this day forward that's where you'll find me. So th...
Last fall I decided to get a tattoo - not so much to express my individuality (as just about every other person has now done) but more to have the experience of getting needled as well as to see how having a permanent piece of portable art would make me feel. The problem was what to get. Tattoo shops are loaded with catalogs of both standard drawings and freelance work. The breadth of options is staggering if you only want something canned. My thoughts went in the other direction - I wanted something that meant something to me, characteristic of my life experience. So I thought about meaningful statements, written in Sanskrit or some other obscure language, or maybe something to do with a bicycle. Or maybe something Chinese. Or who knows, the only thing I did know was that I didn’t want a giant orange Japanese Koi wrapping around my biceps. One day it came to me. While wandering around Sevilla last year, we saw the same logo over and over, on anything that had to do with the m...
We had a couple of hours to kill this afternoon so we decided to visit the famous Ise temple complex, the most famous in all of Japan and the spiritual home for those Japanese who follow the way of Shinto. The native and most ancient religion of Japan, Shinto is a polytheistic practice that believes in spirits residing in the natural world. Because of this basic tenet, the Shinto shrines are very, very beautiful in their construction and landscaping. Entering the grounds immediately imparts a sense of inner peace, which is the intention of the creators of the sites. Kami , the powerful spirits, are enshrined all across the island in consecrated rocks and evergreens, and in sanctuaries called jinja . The word Shinto literally translates as “the way of the kami.” There are more than 100,000 sanctuaries across Japan and Jingu is the most sacred of all. Like Mecca for those who follow Islam, all Shinto are expected to make a pilgrimage to Jingu and to that end it hosts almost a million vis...
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