Dear People of the World (formerly Dear Americans)

It is getting cold lately. A winter is coming close. I do not like winter except that I can go out and ski.

I have good memories of skiing.  

During my college days in the U.S., I visited Colorado to ski 3 times. The same ski resort, Steamboat.

It was college's students ski tour. In the first time we travelled by Amtrack. I remeber it was more than a half day trip from Auckland. Crazily long and boring. 2nd time and 3rd time we went there by plane. Less than 4 hours.  

On 1st time trip, since I had never skied before so I took 1 day ski lesson and that enabled me to ski very well afterwards. Steamboat was a huge ski resort. Even I stayed there for 5 days, I couldn't ski on all of the courses there.

The photo was taken there.

Other place I skied than Steamboat was Zermatt in Switzerland. I skied there in August seeing the view of Matterhorn.

But not as good as Steamboat, because the ski zones were limited because it was summer.  

Well, now I get older, I don't think I want to go out and ski somewhere. There are many good ski resorts in Japan. But not as good as Steamboat or Zermatt. I don't want to get in crowded ski bus or trains to get to a crowded ski resort.

As it gets cold, I would stay longer at home watching DVDs. I rented an old Charlie Angels' drama episode that Angels went to Veil in Colorado to bodyguard a foreign important person. Kate Jackson (or lookalike) skied chasing a criminal very well.

That brought me back Steamboat memories, too.

Skiing is what you have to do NOW. As the whole earth gets warmer, more and more ski slopes are being closed. We wouldn't be enjoying skiing in near future. Maybe we should ski on artificial snow ground.

I was lucky I could enjoy skiing on real snow. It was high quality powder snow. I remember I could not make a snowball out of it.  

I went to Kyoto last night and came back home this morning. It was hectic trip. Indeed it was not a travel for private pleasure. The trip was for business. But I could manage to visit some tourist spots in Kyoto.

 One of them is Gion town street, where my favorit movie "Memoirs of a Geisha" story took place. Geisha named SAYURI grew up there. It was pretty and very Japanese town. Unfortunately I could not see any Geisha walking on the street because it was early in the morning. But I enjoyed the street view very much. See the picture below.

The other place I went to was Kiyomizu Temple. It is famous for high stage wooden building. There is a proverb in Japan, "Jumping off the Kiyomizu Stage." meaning trying to do a big new thing. Imagine how brave you have to be to jump off this stage.

This is the view from the stage. It is 3-5 story building tall but in the old days, it was very high.

You can see other pictures of Kyoto along with other places in my photo album section on the right. Click on Japan Scenaries.

Kyoto is like foreign place for me because I used to live in US for several years and visite many foreign cities in Europe and China. Kyoto is one of great world's heritage.

Kyoto is beautiful, I am planning to visit there again near future. I will talk more about it later.

Last week I went to famous theme park called "Museum Meiji Mura" that exhibites old time buildings in Japan including western style ones which Japan accepted for modernising its society.

It is located in Inuyama, Aichi Japan (Prefecture in the middle region of Japan, 2 hour SuperExpress train ride from Japan).  Please look at http://www.meijimura.com/english/index-e.html

There were beautiful buildings that were transported from where it was. One of the most famous ones is the former Imperial Hotel building which was built in Tokyo, 1923. Only Entrance Hall and the Lobby were exhibited. It was designed by famous American architect named Frank Lloyd Wright. This building experienced a very big earthquake occurred in the year its contruction was completed but it survived.

The inside is below.

It was like a Retro trip.

I went to Egypt last week. 14 hour flight from Tokyo.

I really had fun visiting pyramids and old ruins.

An Egyptian guide I met talked so much about the war in their neighboring country, Iraq.

He repeatedly said to our tour group that the US started the war because they wanted oil, not to provide democracy. He was so emotional about that. I've seen very few American tourists visiting there. I understood why.

I recommend Americans not visit there nowadays although the pyramids and ruins were magnificient.