Summer fireworks and festivals

The best part of the summer for me is when the rainy season is over and the summer festivals begin. Unfortunately this period is usually the hottest time of the year and mix in some high humidity and you get a yucky combination. This summer has been especially bad with day time highs averaging 37 degrees Celsius. I honestly cannot keep the AC off. Anyways, this past weekend I went to check out the festival and fireworks in Chofu. The fireworks were awesome but the food that I got from the different stalls were not so impressive. I plan to visit a couple more festivals and see more fireworks in the coming weeks. I am definitely enjoying this time of year. To end off this post, here are a couple of pictures and a video via my iPhone for your enjoyment!













If it is cut off, you can check it out on my youtube page by clicking on Chofu Fireworks 20100724

Tohoku Trip

It was really nice to take an extended vacation. Unfortunately it is a national holiday in Japan now, however I am back at work. Anyways, my vacation involved taking a road trip to the Tohoku region where I went as far north as Iwate-ken. Other than that I took it easy in Tokyo and just enjoyed not looking at my work laptop though I must admit that I did take peaks on my BlackBerry from time to time. Sometimes, I wish my work never gave me that phone.






Matsushima bay is considered one of the most scenic places in Japan.






Did a brief stop in Fukushima.




In Sendai.... cow tongue never tasted so good!!!!




Checked out the Pacific coast line from Miyagi-ken. Too bad the weather wasn't perfect.




Appi in Iwate-ken. Great time there!




Funky trees.




Nice park in Iwate which sort of reminded me of Inokashira Park in my area.

Vacation and Apps

Man.. I'm finally going to take a vacation longer than a few days starting this Friday. Its been actually about a year since I've taken an extended vacation. Pretty crazy actually. I will be heading to northern Japan. I've always traveled East to West in Japan so I'm looking forward to seeing what the Touhoku region is all about.

I will also be making sure to take lots of pictures with my new phone. Speaking of that, I have been "app store crazy" buying all different kinds of apps including this one photo app. It was much cooler than the default photo application on the phone, but a bit slower. Unfortunately, I found a bug where when taking photos using the flash the entire application would freeze and you would have to exit and re-launch the app to continue to take pictures. I e-mailed the developers and surprisingly they e-mailed me back promptly. It was nice to see this kind of response especially for a 1 dollar app. I actually became one of their beta testers. I was helping them test out their new fixes throughout the weekend, however their latest fix seem to have solved the flash problem but it was buggy everywhere else. I pointed this out to them but they haven't responded since. I hope they do soon because I would love to take some photos using their app during my upcoming trip but at this point its almost unusable due to the bugs. I will probably contact them if I don't hear back in the next 24 hours asking if they completed their fixes into their final release. Hopefully all will be good and I'll be able to post some nice pictures when I get back.