Day in the Life of an Idiot

In further adventures in language learning, Memrise just taught me this amazing phrase that I wish you could hear a native speaker say: "エコじゃないんじゃないかなぁ" It sounds something like "ECHO ja nai n ja nai ka na-a." I know this is hard to parse, but it's a very fun, repetitive sound. It almost sounds like someone pretending they speak Japanese, you know? 

Image: Hello Kitty wishing us a nice trip on the Hello Kitty Shinkansen / Bullet Train

For Children's Day in Japan, Dave (our Canadian ex-pat) took the Hello Kitty Bullet train. I was annoyed by this HeyGo because all of the material for it sad BE ON TIME, leaving promptly when the train departs!! And the time the tour started in Central Time (where I am) was listed as 9:30 pm. I was in the tour ten minutes early and they were clearly well on their way. I checked and double checked because I did not want to miss seeing the exterior. The next HeyGo of interest was with Yusuke. I went along on his Golden Week trip to Nagasaki. Nagasaki is on the Kyushuu Island. As his tour notes say, "Because of its location, rather closer to China than Tokyo, Nagasaki has played an essential role in connecting the nation to the outside world. Especially during the Edo (Tokyo) period (1603 – 1867), the government closed the country from outside the world to prevent the country from foreign influence, except Korea, China, and Holland." So part of what we looked while we were walking around was Oranda-zaka, the Dutch Slope.  

There are several Western-style mansions (that survived the atomic bomb)  that are open to the public. 


Image: Western enclave in Nagasaki

I was not able to stay for the whole tour, but apparently they also visited Japan's oldest Christian church. As I learned from watching Samurai Champloo, Christianity was outlawed in Japan and was a crime you could be, of all ironic things, crucified for.  The secret history of Christianity in Japan is something that shows up periodically in anime. It also featured strongly in an anime series that I adored (but had some issues with at the end) called Kids on the Slope, which I reviewed here: https://mangakast.wordpress.com/2015/07/26/kids-on-the-slope-anime-review-and-thought-about-josei/ (This is one of the very few times that I reviewed an anime as an anime, without a corresponding manga on my site.)

Anyway, this tour was fascinating for its history. As you can see from the above, it was not really a "postcard" friendly tour. 

But, speaking of postcard friendly... the last tour I took was to the Nagamineyama rest stop/observation area.


The snow caped  Northern Alps as viewed from the Nagamineyama rest stop near Azumino City, Nagano Prefecture.

What was fun about last week, of course, is that a lot of the Japanese HeyGo-ers were just taking us along to the places that they'd decided to visit as part of the Japanese Holiday known as Golden Week. Many hardcore manga fans know Golden Week because it is often the ONLY week (often two week period depending on the serialized manga) when JUMP does not publish. I don't know if it's still true, but, in the past, there was much bemoaning here in the West when the next chapter of Bleach was delayed due to this fairly baffling holiday (it's generally described as "The Emperor's Birthday," but there are actually several holidays that make up Golden Week, including Children's Day.) 

Anyway, because it is a full week off, a LOT of Japanese folks will take advantage of the time and go on a vacation. It follows so closely on Hanami that a lot of people will take a couple of weeks, the first to go view the cherry blossoms and then to see whatever else. Clearly, Toshi just wanted to see the Northern Alps and so we went along with him. He was the guy who tried to give us the spectacular ocean view of this mountain range, but we were rained out.

It was a good week for virtual travel. 

Image: May Basket in a tea cup.

Sunday was Beltane (and/or May Day for you international Workers of the world,) and so Shawn and I celebrated by having a couple of friends over for tea. Tea in this case actually being more of a dinner, as it was a early midday meal that was actually fairly large... although it was made up of nibble-ly, finger foods, so lunch? Regardless of what it was called, it was an absolutely amazing time shared with Haddayr C-W and naomikritzer

We sent them both home with "May Basket" teacups, seen above. (Yes, they got to keep the cups. We picked them up thrifting on Saturday, just for this purpose.)

I took a ton of pictures, but all I really want to say about it was that the watercress and egg sandwiches are surprisingly good, it was not as much hassle as I thought it might be to go largely gluten free, and I was really bummed that I could not adequately make Beltane wreathes or fill the May baskets with flowers blooming in our garden BECAUSE NO FLOWERS ARE BLOOMING YET IN THIS HIDEOUS WEATHER.

I mean, seriously, it looks like early April out there in my yard. Only a few crocuses and brave snowdrops have poked up out of the frozen ground to bloom. 

Otherwise, since it is Monday, I thought I would show off the much nicer (though also rainy) weather in Japan. My first trip this last week was with Erika and we went to Ashikaga Flower Park in Tochigi Prefecture, Japan. We were actually here before, in the winter, to see a light show. (https://lydamorehouse.dreamwidth.org/597654.html.)  It's quite a bit different, as you might imagine, in late April.


Wisteria at the flower park in Japan.

It was drizzling a bit this day, which is why there are not a lot of other tourists in these shots. Also, of course, in order to make these live tours even vaguely available for North American tourists, the tour guides often have to be early birds. I think this tour happened around my 5 pm, but it was her 8 am (the next day.)


Brilliant red, pink, and white azaleas against a stormy sky.

We used to have an azalea bush in our front yard and I kind of miss it. I was not good at taking care of it and it was in a very difficult spot to keep well watered. Perhaps I'll try again, because looking at these makes me really miss how brilliant these bushes can be in the early spring. 

I could fill this post with pictures of the pretty flowers and the famous wisteria tree, but I feel slightly compelled to show you the more unusual sites. I will say that I have realized with these HeyGo tours that I am much more fond than I would have thought of strolling through random, out of the way gardens. Perhaps because I am not on any kind of schedule. I suspect that if I were actually paying to travel to Japan right now, I would be desperately trying to chose what to go see and a lot of these odd, quiet, out-of-the way places would not make the list. I honestly think that this is the strongest case for HeyGo. It's a great way to "travel" to the places you would never make time for if you only had two weeks (or however long) to spend in Japan.

So, in keeping with the theme of "places I would probably never put on an itinerary," I next visited Tomonoura in the Hiroshima Prefecture with Toshi.


View from inside the temple...

For anime fans, apparently the town of Tomonoura was an inspiration for Miyazaki's Ponyo.  The Wolverine with Hugh Jackman was also filmed here.  It is a quaint little port town that I would probably never visit in a million years. There is an old lighthouse there and an amazing hillside shrine with a cemetery I would have loved Toshi to explore more, but we were already over time at that point.

The only other picture that I want to share from this HeyGo was the picture of the suge-dama outside of the sake brewery we passed in town. 


Image: an odd twiggy, brown ball hanging off of a second story awning.

I honestly live for information like this. So, the suge-dama (杉玉) is a ball of cedar branches that signals the freshness of the sake. Sake, though we refer to it as "rice wine" here in the West, is really more like beer. Most sake does need a maturation period of about a year, I guess, but the brewers will put out a green ball when the newest batch is ready/fresh for the season. This one is obviously past its prime. :-) Although, I found another article that suggests that the brown might be an indication that the sake is actually ready: https://sake-world.com/sugidama-sake-lore-of-olde-cryptomeria-balls/

At any rate, I found this little detail very fascinating. 

I went on another tour in hopes of another spectacular view, but the clouds conspired to rob us of a good picture of Mount Tsurugi from Himi City. (If you go to this site and scroll down to the second picture, that was what we were hoping for: https://www.snowmonkeyresorts.com/activities/tateyama-mountains-top-3-viewing-spots/)

Instead, the best we got was a close up of that little island:

Image: a cool little island in the sea.

So there's your weekly dose of Japan, if you are interested. I did not do any vintage lunch recipes today because I got caught up working on my novel instead.

 
Image: A torii gate surrounded by cherry blossoms (near the Ayato-kunaka-jinja Shrine, Minami Ward, Kyoto.)

I will probably tire of these some day, but, right now, I'm still finding a lot to enjoy. 

First up this week, the demon tour guide, Makoon, took us to a World Heritage site, Tenryū Shiseizen-ji  at sunrise. This was a very special tour, because the monks at the temple allowed Makoon in hours before the gates officially opened, so it was just us (really just Makoon and his livestreaming gear.) 

I've talked about this guide before, because he has distractingly long fingernails. In an anime, this would totally be a clue to the big reveal that he is secretly a demon or part-demon (or a demon working a part time job!!)  I spent a weird amount of the time trying to get a good shot of this man's amazingly demonic fingernails and I do think I managed to get a decent one.


Image: Not the best, but you can see a bit of the sharpness on the nails on the bottom left hand side.

His hands are lovely? He's a great guide? It's just that the fic writer in me really would love a universe where, you know, this nice young man is living an alternate life as a demon. Is that too much to ask?? I mean, it does add a certain something to the tour to imagine that at any minute a Hell Gate could open and Makoon would be forced to transform into his True Self in order to protect the universe from the denizens of hell, aka his colleagues. Meanwhile, he's just living his best life pretending to be human. 

I would read the f*ck out of this manga, honestly.

Anyway, back to what REALLY happened on the tour, which was that we walked around a very serene garden of the temple, which is located in Susukinobaba-chō, Ukyō Ward, Kyoto, Japan. 


Image: a classic scene of a stone lantern perched on a moss hill, framed in light pink cherry blossoms.



Image: The tahou-den constructed in 1934 (though built in the Kamakura Period style.)

The thing that was funniest to me was the amount of time that Makoon explaining to us the purpose of meditating and then sitting in front of a crystal clear lake encouraging us to do the same. I mean, I was eating dinner? 


Image: The Sōgen Pond with a reflection of the mountains on the still waters.

The next HeyGo tour I went on last week was to Hiroshima with a new guide: JJ (Joy) Walsh. Joy is an interesting tour guide. She is another expat, who is apparently (if I understood correctly) originally from Hawaii. English is her first language, but she speaks at least some Japanese. She also has a YouTube Channel: https://www.youtube.com/c/JJWalshInboundAmbassador/videos in which she focuses on sustainability issues in Japan. As part of this she interviews a lot of people (in English, though in at least one video she also hired/has on a translator.) I have to respect this a lot.

She lives in Hiroshima with her family and she took us for a lovely riverside walk among the cherry blossoms.


Image: a lovely path among the cherry blossoms in Hiroshima.

I took a TON of postcard pictures of this walk, but it seems silly to try to share them all here, since they are variations on what you see above. 

Joy also took us over the Miyajima Island, also known as Itsukushima. You have probably seen pictures of this particular temple complex, because of the famous red, "floating" torii gate in the sea. Unfortunately, the gate itself is under construction, but we did wander around the rest of the floating temple. Because so many of the tours have to be in the early morning in order to catch North American and European viewers, the tide had no entirely come up yet, which was kind of fascinating in its own right. You never think of the fact that you could walk up to that Tori gate when the tide was out.

At any rate, her is a picture of the Five Story Pagoda which is also on the island.


Image: Miyajima Island's Goju-no-to (Five story) Pagoda through the cherry blossoms

Here is a shot of the floating shrine at low tide:


Image: Floating shrine at Miyajima Island

The island apparently has a lot of lovely hiking trails, as well. Joy recommended that if we ever decided that we wanted to see this place that we should actually find a hotel on the island somewhere. Even just walking up to the pagoda, Joy ran into one of the locals.


Miyajima Island deer.

Apparently, they used to sell crackers you could feed the deer at the train station and so visitors used be mobbed by the hopeful deer. A few still come looking for handouts, even though they stopped selling the crackers some time ago.

Then, I went on another cherry viewing walk, near the Lake Biwa canals of The Philosopher's Walk, Tetsugaku-no-michi.  

Image: the cherry blossoms in Kyoto

This is a tourist destination. It's called The Philosopher's Walk because two 20th century university professors, Nishida Kitaro and Hajime Tanabe, apparently took this path as part of their daily exercise. But, it just a lovely path that walks along the canal and past a number of shrines. This was another walk where I took a ton of postcards, but they really basically all look exactly like this. I mean, we did see a couple of ducks swimming in the canal, but, you know, I will not bore you with that.

I suspect this is already a LOT, as the kids used to say.

Fortunately, we have reached the end of last week's various tours. I have a lot of other stuff I want to tell you all about that happened over the weekend, not the least of which is that I got my hearing tested. I passed with the caveat of "for someone my age," which means I have lost a bit of the upper register, which was pretty much as expected. I went in because I am turning 55, and because there is a lot of "did you hear me?" at this point in out lives in this house of aging women. But, that's not what I wanted to tell you. The whole test was so weird. I mean there were beeps and such, like I remembered, but then there were bits that had me half expecting to have my inner Winter Soldier awaken, since, as part of it, they have you repeat these very unrelated words. Longing, rusted, seventeen, daybreak... I mean, obviously not those exact words, but it was totally like this!  Then there was a section where I had to repeat a very odd phrase that was long and complex, as best as I could, but with louder and louder "cafe babble" happening in the other ear. That one was straight out of Blade Runner, because the phrases were like, "In a dry, lonely desert, the man came across a turtle on his back." I was tempted to start shouting, "My mother? I'll tell you about my mother!!" *table flip*  But, the audiologist said I did better than a lot of people, and I think that was entirely due to the fact that I found the phrases like weird little story prompts and so they stuck in my head.

The other thing I want to share is that I was able to attend a livestream of a theater play in Portland, that stars my god(dess) daughter, Naomi. So much fun! But, I want to give that one a bit more context so I will save it for tomorrow.

See you all then!

 
Image: Kokedera (Moss Shrine) in Kyoto, Japan.

So, yeah, this last week's highlight, for me at least, was the cemetery tour, which I've already featured. I did enjoy this little jaunt into Saihoji (西芳寺, Saihōji), more commonly known as Kokedera (苔寺), the Moss Shrine. It was just really pretty to walk around in. 


Image: moss, moss, and more moss!

The ema (絵馬), the little wooden prayer tokens, for this particular shrine had a cool character on them. Possibly the prince who had the building constructed? I would guess so, since that hat looks like those worn by men in the Nara Period. 


Image: cool ema from the shrine. 

I had another night where I was up in the middle of the night, so I popped onto HeyGo to see what what happening. I caught the very end of a trip to Nara Park. Nara Park is probably most famous for its deer. 


Image, a nicely labeled plum tree in Katakana (ウマ) and deer in the background. 

This park is apparently quite huge and I probably missed the best part of this tour, but that's what you get randomly waking up at 4:30 am. The plum trees were quite lovely, however.


Image: the plum blossoms of Nara Park.

Technically, I popped into a couple of other tours, but I didn't end up staying for the full thing for either of them for... no good reason that I can discern. My fascination for Japan is bottomless, but sometimes I'm just not in the mood for shaky cam or tour guides who are clearly reading off index cards.  Or, just not in the mood, if I'm honest. 

I have a whole bunch of tours planned for this week, but since many of them are cherry blossom centric, they may be cancelled. The blossoms are being stubborn this year, apparently  

Anyway, I did a bunch of cool things this weekend, including finally going through a box of envelopes I got as part of a Buy Nothing giveaway of someone's uncle's stamp collection. I am recycling a lot of envelopes and such from the late 1880s, most of which are empty, but I did find a couple of letter and other odd treasures that I will share with you all in another post. 

Until then!

Image: illuminated plum blossoms in Suzuka Forest Garden, Suzuka, Mie Prefecture, Japan.

Because I injured my back awhile ago, I have been sleeping less well. (No worries, though, I am very clearly on the mend and I'm supplementing with some rest during the day and exercises to keep limber.) Rather than let that time go to 'waste' and to distract myself, I've been going a lot more HeyGo tours than I normally do. (Again, just for the new folks, HeyGo is a livestream touring company which I recently discovered.) By chance, last night I was up at 4:30 am CST / 6:30 pm in Japan. Erika was touring The Suzuka Forest Garden.

Because Suzuka is in a mountain range, Erika's signal was a bit choppier than usual, but we had a lovely half hour stroll among the illuminated plum trees. By chance, we came across a wedding photo shoot in progress.


Image: The bride in white and groom in hakama among the plum blossoms.

Going backwards in time, on Sunday, I went with the new tour guide, David, who is a Canadian who has been living in Japan for the last twenty years. He took us to Kiyomizu Temple in Kyoto. You may recognize it from this iconic shot.


Image: Kiyomizu's main temple on an overcast day, through the not-yet-blooming cherry trees. 

One of the cool, "did you know?" facts about Kiyomizu Temple is that not a single nail was used in its construction. Dave suggested that the construction method was an import from Korean, which I have not independently verified. A quick internet search brings up mixed results, so I will take that with a grain of salt. 

Regardless, the thing I found the most fascinating about Kiyomizu was that despite this being a Buddhist temple, there is a love shrine (a Shinto shrine) on the same grounds. 


Image: Torii gate INSIDE the temple grounds... the old god cohabitating with the new

This is Jishu Shrine is dedicated to the god Okuninushi no Mikoto, sometimes called "The Cupid of Japan." While we were there we watched several high school girls attempting to walk with their eyes shut between the two sacred stones. The idea being if you can do this, your true love will become yours. You are allowed to have guidance, but if a friend aids you, they have to pledge to help guide the love between the two people involved as well. 


Image: the sacred stone of Jishu shrine

I find this fascinating, because I feel like having a Shinto shrine inside a Buddhist Temple is generally fascinating. I doubt the Kiyomizu Temple is alone in sharing its grounds with an old, indigenous god, but I feel like the Western equivalent would be wandering into a high Catholic church and finding a section randomly dedicated to Cernunnos, complete with an altar and offerings--which I mean.... I have told you about the white stag in my grandparent's Catholic church right? This is an actual stain glass window,, just to the left of the main altar, with the whole Christ as white, horned stag that kind of gave me pause when I looked at it while watching the priest circle my grandmother's coffin THREE times, with incense.  (Three being the trinity, but of course also a very pagan number, being the Maiden, Mother, Crone.)

I mean, yes, back to my point. This might be the most apt metaphor, since there is no question that when the Roman church proselytized to the Britons and the Irish, they clearly sort of looked the other way when the newly converted pagans insisted on continuing the maypole tradition. Likewise the church actively adopted the idea the rabbits were somehow related to Christ's return and not say, a longstanding symbol, of the Goddess and fertility.  Likewise, they just straight up let Jesus be the Horned God.

And so, I imagine it is, with Shintoism and Buddhism in Japan.  Still, it feels kind of brazen? Like, the popularity of this love shrine was fascinating to me, coming from a place here in the West that is far more insistent that we separate our pagan roots from our dominant, far more modern religions. I had long known that many Japanese folks consider themselves a combination of Shinto and Buddhist, but this was the first time I saw just how COMBINED that practice has been from the beginning. 

As we left Kiyomizu Temple, Dave took us through a massive graveyard.


Image: a cemetery in Kyoto, just outside of Kiyomizu Temple.

This was also relevant to my interests because my Japanese pen pal recently asked me about family graves in America. I had to explain that we kind of do, but we kind of don't have family graves. They don't look like these, that's for sure. There are some? Here in America, if you do a lot of hanging out in graveyards, like I do, one can see the occasional monument in the US with some family name on it, surrounded by smaller plaques of various individuals.

Each one of these slabs that you see above is likely a whole family since the majority of bodies are cremated in Japan. We also don't rent our graves; we buy the land, the plot, outright. This came up because Eiko and her husband are considering abandoning their family grave because it is getting too expensive to maintain and with her daughter (who I believe is her only child) in America, there's no reasonable expectation of passing the costs to the next generation. 

I also had to explain that my personal ethnic culture doesn't really do grave visits, either. At least nothing codified, like Bon.  I did explain that there are some Americans, however, who do have traditional holidays where grave visitation is part of the celebration, like The Day of the Dead and others. 

And, of course, let's not lie. The first place I saw a cemetery like this was in Bleach. 

Earlier on the same day, Sunday, I visited Hiraoka Shrine in Higashiosaka, Japan with another "new" tour guide, Kendra. Kendra is a lovely young woman from the UK. 


Image: Hiraoka Shrine, Osaka Prefecture, Higashiosaka, Japan

This walk was nice because it had just rained and so everything was so very green, a color that crave this time of year. Legend has it that this shrine is so old that it was dedicated before the first Emperor of Japan took the throne.  There are apparently three gods associated with this shrine, including Ame-no-Koyane who seems to have been instrumental in folktale reminiscent of Persephone, in which a storm god frightened Amaterasu into a cave and her light disappeared from the world. He performed a ritual of prayer to the sun that brought her back. So, seems like an important guy this time of year.

Then on Thursday, we took a nice stroll through Kiba Park in Tokyo with Erika just to look at some early blooming cherry trees. 


Early blooming cherry trees along the canal in Tokyo

On Wednesday, I was with Dave in Kyoto again, looking at the plum blossoms in a park with a view of Osaka Castle. 


Image: plum trees with Osaka Castle in the far distance.

And, finally a nice close up of the plums in bloom...


Image: plum blossoms

All and all a great bunch of trips. It was just what my body needed to help heal.  
 

I may risking jinxing it, but the writing thing has been working amazingly lately. I entirely credit all the words that I am getting on the page to my hour long Zoom meeting with naomikritzer every day (Monday-Thursday.)  I will be the first to admit that I usually poo-poo the whole concept of "writing dates," even though they have worked for me in the past, particularly with the MinnSpec meet-up.  They seem like they should be silly? Why would I write more just because I am sitting on a Zoom call? YET. I think having someone who is keeping me accountable totally works, plus, with the daily thing, it's a time I know I have already allocated for writing. It is SO EASY to do almost anything else all day long, instead of writing.

Writers: people for whom writing is more difficult than it is for most people.

Anyway, that's a yay.

I didn't post in yesterday's "What are you Reading Wednesday" meme-thingie because even though you lovely folks have nicely chosen my next book to read (We Have Always Been Here), I have not managed to crack it open.  Not sure what's up with that.  I sometimes feel like a fake fan, because I don't read nearly as much as all of the rest of y'all.  I haven't even been watching all that much anime to make up for my geek cred. I've been stuck working my way through campaign 2 of "Critical Role" (while also keeping up on the current campaign 3... ahhhh! Bye, Dorian Storm!!) My anime-turned-C-Drama friend had me watching the "Untamed (陈情令)" spin-off, "Fatal Journey (乱魄)"  the last time I was there. We also watched a few episodes of "Once Upon A Time In Lingjian Mountain (从前有座灵剑山)" and then switched to South Korea for "Hotel del Luna (호텔 델루나)."

I got her to watch exactly twenty minutes of an episode of "Sweetness & Lightning (甘々と稲妻)."

Sigh.

Let's see, other news... well, speaking of anime, my Japanese pen pal sent a letter recently that included a anime-themed stamp:


Image: Demon Slayer (鬼滅の刃) stamp

As for the rest, you'll have to forgive me. I'm not feeling terribly brilliant today.

The last thing I'll say is that it looks like we're getting an influx of folks who are finally abandoning LJ thanks to the invasion of Ukraine. *waves hello to any newcomers!* 

 
Image: Abeno Harukas, tallest skyscraper in Osaka (arguably in Japan.)

I'm not normally a fan of tours of buildings. With the obvious exception of things like museums, I will almost always prefer to walk a neighborhood than to go inside a capitol building or the top floor of the world's tallest whatever. However, I spotted this tour of Osaka's tallest skyscraper on HeyGo and thought, why not?  The tour guide for this one was Timea Yamamoto, a Romanian woman who is living in Japan (and from the looks of her last name, likely married or related to someone Japanese.) 

We started the tour at the train station, which was probably my favorite part?


Image: The Kintetsu Osaka Abenobashi Station in Osaka


Image: Another view of the pedestrian bridges of the station.

Someone on the tour remarked that the city of Osaka is not normally on a lot of people's tour itinerary. It is the third largest city in Japan, and the things I know about it are kind of vague. Comedy? Industry??  A unique dialect? Frankly, I would love more tours of Osaka just to see if it's the sort of place I might add to my list of places to see. 

But, back to the tour. Once inside the building, I lost a lot of interest. There are some nifty things inside. There's a museum and one of the largest department stores in Japan and several observation decks, etc., but it's a building? With stuff in it? The tour was specifically to take us to Harukas 300 (so named because it is 300 meters tall.) The trippiest part was the elevator ride, in which they have you look up at the glass ceiling and the elevator shaft has a light show as you travel upwards at great speed. Timea was a little dizzy once she stepped off the elevator.

We had a lot of connectivity problems at the top to the tower, which didn't frustrate me as much as you might think, because once you've seen the city scape once, the shine wears off quickly (at least for me)


Osaka from 300 meters up. (Note of interest, that big square section on the lower right is a cemetery.)

I also got a little sea sick near the end because Timea took us down into the gift shop and there was something about how the camera swung from one shelf to the next that made me a little nauseous. I'm normally okay with this stuff, but, for whatever reason, I couldn't cope this time, so I bailed out. 

This tour was still fun. Someone else on the tour was from Minnesota, someone named Lisa R., so that was cool? (Waving if you're an internet friend of mine!) But, I knew this one would be less interesting for me because of its subject matter. I'm just NOT a building person. I have done those things you're supposed to do in cities, like go to the top of the tall buildings, etc., (like in Paris, we did go to the top of the Eiffel Tower) but it never really does all that much for me.  

Otherwise, I had a quiet weekend. We did a bunch of errands and I worked on a new quilt.