My day started with walking across the street from our hotel, the Dōtonbori Hotel, to grab a coffee from the Lawsons convenience store. I’ve never seen such a wide selection of canned coffee and tea – for me, it’s heaven. After settling on my coffee of the day, I joined Burt and Mari for a quick stroll around the area. I even stumbled across a Lush, which I’ve also been to in Florence, Dublin, Vancouver, and Auckland, besides the American locations. It’s now on my travel checklist to always try to find an international Lush!

We settled on having lunch at Kukuru, a location famous for its takoyaki. We ordered its three featured flavors: original, shrimp, and bacon with cheese!

After lunch, it was time to venture back to Kyoto! However, when we got into our train car to Osaka’s Umeda station, we began to notice something…

“Um…Burt? What’s that behind you?”

Oops! But the women in that train car didn’t make a fuss about it, so all was well!

We then took the express train to Kyoto. I still find the different lines and seat rules confusing, but we did score priority seats because there were no elderly, disabled, or pregnant women to give them to!

Upon our arrival in Kyoto, we jumped in a taxi and headed to the Rinzai Zen Daitoku-ji temple grounds, which contains several sub-temples and has been the setting for many historical figures, including tea ceremony master Sen no Rikyū. Despite the nearly overwhelming summer heat in Kyoto, we spent quite a while wandering the grounds, examining temples and enjoying the gardens.

I was particularly excited to discover one Japanese maple tree in completely red foliage! It’s always been a dream of mine to see the Japanese maples in Kyoto in their autumn glory, so even though this tree was early, I was very happy to be able to photograph it.

Once we couldn’t take the heat anymore, we caught another taxi to Nishiki Market, a famous covered market street featuring a huge variety of Kyoto’s specialty foods and crafts. Though our initial goal was to find some kakigori, or shave ice, to beat the heat, we ended up sampling our way up and down the market until dinnertime! Foods we sampled included iced teas made with well water, yuzu (a Japanese citrus) juice, fresh senbei (rice crackers), tomato kakigori, tofu doughnuts and hot dog, and more. It was also fun to people-watch in the marketplace, as we spotted one particularly interesting character.

For dinner, we ate at a seafood-specialty restaurant, Daiyasu, and met up with Sophie, a Hawaii Twitterer who has been in Kobe for a summer study abroad! There, I ate my first raw oyster, as well as a grilled oyster, some spectacular sashimi, and ebi that still had their heads and tails attached! I think Burt has a video of my pulling apart my first ebi-with-eyes.

Once we were finished eating, we backtracked down the market to find a dessert shop we’d spotted earlier, Mochitsukiya. There, we ordered a selection of yuzu kakigori, yuzu juice with warabi mochi, and a type of noodle served in ice water and dipped in a black honey sauce. Thanks to my mobile WiFi rental, I learned that warabi mochi is not made from mochi flour, but from a starch made of brackens, aka ferns!

Happy and satisfied with our dessert, we finally decided to head out of the market to the main event of the night: The Gion Festival. I’d noticed throughout the afternoon in Kyoto that there were numerous people already dressed in yukata for the festival, and sure enough, there were a variety of colorful yukata being worn on the streets.

A few of Kyoto’s main streets were closed to vehicle traffic, and were thus absolutely packed with people walking around, buying food from street vendors and playing festival games. The gigantic Gion Festival floats were also on display in the side streets.

It’d been a long day, so we finally headed to the station to catch a train back to Osaka. This time, because of the festival, the train was more crowded than it had been previously, so I had my first experience standing up for a Japanese train ride, though it wasn’t as packed in as the stories I’ve heard! We noticed an advertisement for traveling to Hawaii right next to where we were standing, and two of the planes illustrated in the ad were obviously Hawaiian Airlines! I thought it was fitting to see.

Back in Osaka, we had to take one more train from Umeda to Namba, where Dōtonbori is. While Mari went back to the hotel, I spent a few more minutes walking around with Burt to take some photos of Dōtonbori by night.

Special thanks goes out to Ashley Smith of Taryn Reid Photography for loaning me her fisheye lens for this trip!  Go follow her on Twitter, Facebook, and her blog, she’s awesome!

And more from my travel companions:

• Burt’s Day 3 photos
• Mari’s Day 3 blog

Related Posts:

• Osaka 2011 – Day 1
• Osaka 2011 – Day 2
• Osaka 2011 – Day 4

*Graphic designer friends, please don’t kill me for my horrendous attempt at typography. <3

PS. I didn’t spell-check. ><

Fast-forward to two months later, specifically Valentine’s Day.  On this day, he left for his year-long deployment to Afghanistan.  I never thought I would be a military girlfriend dealing with deployment, but when you know, you know, and he is completely worth the wait.  To help document my experiences over the next year on being the significant other of a deployed soldier, I’ve started a 365 Photo blog over on Posterous.  I’m already 3 days down, with at least 362 days left to go, but it has already helped me get through these first few days.

Ed himself is also blogging his deployment via Posterous, so please check it out.  I have contributor permissions for his blog, so I may post something once in a while from the POV of the ‘girlfriend back home’.  His father, Mark White, is also blogging there from a fatherly perspective, so you, dear reader, will get the full deployment experience!

I’ll leave you now with a preview shot from our portrait shoot together with the fantastic Lisa Hoang of Windwardskies Photography!

In short:

Ed’s Twitter

Ed’s Deployment Blog

My 365 Photo Blog

There are a few more announcements of projects and such on the horizon, and I will hopefully be blogging a lot more now, so stay tuned.

Constant vigilance!

I’m on the left, my dad is on the right. 40 years between these two photos.  Both are retouched by the original photographers, and not by me.  Been spending the day sorting through family photographs and deciding which should be scanned.  Came across a ton of baby photos of my brother and I, so I’ll probably post a few of those too!

Now I just need my mom‘s senior photo, and I’ve got my set!

*EDIT*

Okay, mom sent hers, so here we are!

1.  The Mirror Shot

Strike a sassy pose, hold the camera with your head tilted ever-so-slightly toward it, and snap a photo.  Don’t turn off the flash!

2.  The Improved Mirror Shot

Realize that you should probably turn off the flash, so you get closer to the mirror to use two hands so the camera is steadier, as all your other non-flash photos were blurry even for you.  Since your face is showing, better show off those lips!  Pout!  Also, don’t look at the camera lens so you are making eye-contact with the viewer — just look at yourself!

3.  The Two-Person Photo

Wow!  You have to document that you were in a certain place with a certain person, even though we can’t see anything behind you, thus never knowing where you were! (Although red cups would indicate a party…)  Who cares if it looks like 90% of the other photos of you on Facebook, it’s so you can remember this exact moment!  It may take a couple tries, and it’s even better if you upload all the failed shots in sequence with your successful one.

4.  The Myspace Shot

This shot is best for putting a photo on Myspace that shows you at your most attractive.  Your body type can’t be seen, and your face tightens as you tilt it up.  Simply hold the camera above you as high as you can reach and point down!  Often results in mischievous expressions.

5.  The Simple Portrait

When no one else wants to take a photo of you, all you do is hold out the camera, tilt your chin, and snap the shutter!  It’s you at your most basic.  Who cares if the point-and-shoot you have is distorting your face with its wide-angle lens being held at arm’s length?

6.  The Contemplative, aka The Emo

When you need to show the world that you’re a serious, deep-thinking individual.  Look down and away from the camera, and hair in your face is a bonus.  If you’re really serious, make the photo black and white by desaturating the image and upping the contrast!

Okay, so, I guess it’s obvious that these styles of photos that you see plastered all over MySpace/Facebook/etc. irk me, but what can you do?  They are a style of portraiture for the modern digital age, where everyone has a point-and-shoot digital camera!  But really people, you can do better, it’s not hard.  Next time, how to improve your terrible-typical photographs!