📏 Weekly Measure: 2024 W50

2024 December 15

Hi hello, I am back a whole *mumbles* month later *mumbles* for the second installment of The Weekly Measure. No, I’m not changing the name of this series, I still believe I can do these weekly. Let’s just go!! Enough hand-wringing!!

Oot and aboot in Ōfuna

Last weekend, Daikon and I went to Ōfuna to visit the Ōfuna Flower Center.

Huge white Ofuna Kannon statue poking out of the mountain forest

On the walk over, we found a kind of cool, kind of scary little tunnel. It is only about as wide across as a single car, the road has this interesting pavement instead of regular asphalt, and the walls inside are lined with this corrugated metal. We did not, unfortunately, encounter Turbo Baba.

A small, narrow and low tunnel set in the side of a hill, with vines and plants crawling down
The inside of the tunnel lined with metal

We also bought daifuku and ohagi from a cute baachan at the station selling them for a Kagawa food stall. She made sure to tell us she is not actually from Kagawa 😅 They are super yummy.

Person holding up a kinako ohagi in one hand and a tray with white, green, and brown daifuku and ohagi
Kinako ogahi with brown powdery outside, white rice and red bean paste inside
Yellowish green daifuku with red bean paste and chestnut inside

Arriving at the flower center ✌️ There were, as you’d imagine, not a lot of flowers in December (outside of the greenhouse, anyway) but it was still really peaceful and nice.

Japanese style garden with a pond and bridge over it, and pine trees and other plants
Japanese garden with a puffy green pine tree growing on a small island in the middle of a pond, with a little wooden footbridge crossing the water
Road through the flower center leading to the glass green house at the end, and lined with autumn trees and plants
A red dragonfly resting on a wooden board
Grassy field with huge pumpkins and gourds scattered around

Inside of the greenhouse. It was so hot and humid in here, like stepping into a portal back to August.

Inside of a large greenhouse letting in sunlight. The room is filled with green trees and plants, and on the right are red semi-transparent hanging screens
A cluster of small logs with Santa faces painted on the ends, surrounded by potted plants
A purple banana flower with a green cluster of developing bananas above it
A large pond with lilypads and flowers floating on its surface

The rose garden was still going strong even though the season was long over.

Two red roses with many dense layers of petals
Bushes of light orange and purple roses
Line of different-colored rose bushes, with yellow gingko trees in the background
Two red roses standing against a blue sky

Took a break in the rose garden and ate some hyōroku mochi candy. We got this at a Kyushu food stall the previous week. It tastes like… nori and green tea, haha. I don’t know if I like it, but I also don’t hate it. Though I definitely need to have this with some green tea…

Box of hyōroku mochi, with a picture of a samurai on it. Inside are dark green candies wrapped in clearish rice paper

There was a very tiny child doing sumo thrusts with their arms as they tottered along, and their parent watching going どすこい、どすこい (the sound sumo wrestlers make when doing this arm-thrust motion). Only too late did parent and child realize they had どすこい’d right into a rose bush 😭 (Luckily the kid was all right, I think more shocked that parent suddenly yelped NONONO NOT THERE–)

Met some good guys (nongendered):

Four blobby green bushes, each with two large cartoonish blue eyes
Heron on the other side of a white fence and walking alongside a pond

Another tiny child was playing hide-and-seek with their father around the pumpkins. Things were going well until the child declared it’s Papa’s turn to hide, and the poor dude did his best to crouch behind one of these:

Cluster of large green and orange pumpkins scattered on a grassy field

And the kid immediately was like “Papa… you totally failed” ぜんぜんダメだな 😭😭😭

We didn’t get to drive to the mountains to see the fall leaves this year, but walking through this park is a decent substitute.

Yellow gingko trees standing against a blue sky with the sun breaking through on the right side
Daikon walking along a path through a forest dappled with sunlight
Bench sitting along a path through red and green maple trees
Looking up through red, green, and orange maple leaves with the blue sky behind
Towering yellow gingko trees standing against a blue sky surrounded by a yellow carpet of leaves

After the park, we crossed the Kashiogawa and saw a single golden carp among the swarm of normal carp, and a pair of cormorants. (You gotta trust me that there were two, they kept diving underwater so I couldn’t get a pic of both of them 😅)

Golden carp swimming in a river
A cormorant swimming along the river

We saw the sign for a nice-looking Indian curry place, but after walking for a while we arrived just in time for them to tell us they were closing up to prepare for dinner 😔 So instead we went to our favorite chain restaurant, (sung to the tune of Outkast’s “Hey Ya”) Tenya. Apparently one of these is fugu, my first time eating it. It was good! I don’t think I’ve been poisoned!!

Bowl of ten-don, assorted tempura on rice. Beside it is a bowl of miso soup and a small plate of yellow pickled vegetables

A couple more photos from walking around Ōfuna:

View from a footbridge over a road in Ofuna. Behind the cars and buildings, there are trees colored red and orange, and light poles stretching cables across the sky
Market street in Ōfuna with food stalls, restaurants, and other shops. People are crowded along the street in front of the shops

Finally, after a long day, we walked home from Fujisawa Station in the twilight. I think I walked more that day than I did in all of November combined 😅

The sky is orange and purple from the sunset, and the buildings, street signs, and power lines are silhouetted black against the colorful sky

Getting back into photography, maybe

Once upon a time, my hobby used to be taking pictures of flowers. It’s been (7?! geez) years since my last photo walk and I am very rusty, and it’s not like I was a pro before. But I would like to get back into it.

Here are more pics from our trip to Ōfuna Flower Center:

Clusters of red Neoregelia leaves forming water 'cups' inside
Unfurled pink fuyou flowers dangling from a shrub
Open pink hibuscus flower
Dusty grayish-purple hibiscus
Small red flowers with round yellow 'holes' in the center, growing on leaves with roundish green leaves
Long 'standing' orange-red Ruttya flowers with dark gooey centers
Large purple banana flower danging down with a bunch of still-developing green bananas clustered above
Yellow-white lily flower and leaves floating on water
Red poinsettias wrapped in shiny gold film
Cluster of pink peonies growing on a bush
A white rose against a huge blue sky
A red rose growing on a bush
Creamy peach-colored roses on a bush against a blue sky
A riot of different-colored roses stretching in a long row, with yellow autumn trees in the background against a blue sky
Pink peonies in a row on a bush, starting with one still furled up, then spreading to others that have opened fully
Red maple leaves against a stark blue sky
Stalks of silvergrass standing against a blue sky
Stalks of silvergrass like water spraying from a fountain, with a Japanese garden in the background
Two red roses standing against a blue sky

The pictures in the first section of this page were all taken on my phone, and the ones in this section were taken on my Nikon D40, a beginner-level DSLR that I got for ~2万円 from Hard Off over a decade ago. The lens I have is a 35mm which was, I wanna say, in the 1-2万 range. Photography can be an expensive hobby but it’s also not completely out of reach for a layperson. If you can swing out, try it out!

And really, you don’t need a fancy schmancy camera, especially to start. Your phone will do perfectly fine and is a good way to practice framing shots. The best camera is the one you can be bothered to bring with you, after all. What I am trying to tell you is that you need to get a camera and then go on photo walks with me, because I need someone to hold me accountable and keep me company 😭

Real photographers are looking at my pics and going HMPH, amateur hour. And that’s fine, I need to practice more and luckily I have plenty of room to improve. It’s nice always having something new to strive towards!

Henry Time

Your weekly dose of Henry:

Gray cat lying on a white sofa with his head leaning up against the armrest
Same cat but from a different angle, showing his yellow eyes looking over to the side and his cheek smushed against the armrest

That’s all for now, see you next week! 👋

Footnotes

  1. A Japanese urban legend of a granny who can run at or over 100kph along highways. Yes, we have been watching Dandadan recently. ↩
  2. Sticky rice cakes with red bean jam inside. Incredibly tasty. ↩
  3. Kind of the inverse of a daifuku, with the crushed red bean paste packed around the outside of the rice cake. ↩
  4. Stands for Digital Single-Lens Reflex, i.e. the kind of camera where you can swap out the lens, and saves to raw digital files and not film. ↩

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