Own Your Encore

A visit to the Frank Lloyd Wright designed Jiyu Gakuen Myonichikan school is probably not on many Americans must see in Tokyo list. We were able to wander the rooms and image what it was like for Jeanettes mother who attended here in the 1930s. This location is now a cultural heritage site and the…

We continue to explore!  Saturday we went to the Higashiyama area in Kyoto. This is a busy tourist area but we headed to some small calm museums. We started at the Shibori Museum run by a family who have a long history in shibori. The technique we were shown involves plucking very small pinches of…

The food edition. Starting with the Kyoto street market food stalls. One of the first stalls we saw offered Nukazuke- Japanese fermented vegetables that are made using rice bran and yeast! Jeanette said her mom used to make these in a pickling crock. The Japanese have many seasonings, pickled and fermented foods that we typically…

We started with a hike to the iconic Fushimi Inari Taisha shrine grounds… along with a few hundred others. We were not here as devotees but wanted to hike the wooded slopes of  Mount Inari. The famous vermilion torii gates are impressive and there are statues of foxes holding symbolic items all along the trail.…