Off into the sunset …

On my last morning — where, according to one sign, it was 40°C — I managed a couple of excursions before my flight homeward. My first port of call, and priority for the morning, was the Kinkaku-ji Temple (officially called Rokuon-ji), site of the famous golden temple. The highlight of the trip is actually the […]

Most international conferences that I attend usually include a half-day excursion and thus it was that I got to visit Osaka.

The tour gave me the impression that Osaka is really just a very large city. We had a fairly unscenic cruise on the river and about the most exciting thing about this was the […]

I then figured out how to catch the subway, making my way east to the Nanzen-ji Buddhist temple complex. Here there were more impressive wooden buildings and gorgeous gardens.

There was also an unexpected brick aqueduct. I found a cache here (although I needed the photo hint as my phone GPS isn’t the most accurate and there […]

On my second free day I decided to visit Nijo Castle.

This amazing place was the seat of the feudal shogun government from the early 1600s The main palace building itself is an impressive massive timber structure. We had to remove our shoes in order to walk around the interior of this building (and taking photos […]

After attending a mathematics education conference in Auckland (my regular annual conference involving mostly Australians and New Zealanders) I headed off to Japan for the four-yearly international statistics education conference. This was my first real visit to Japan (overnighting at an airport hotel en route to somewhere else hardly counts) and, fortuitously, the conference was […]