A Year in Pictures – Shrine Above the Waves

Naminoue-gu
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Since I have set a new speed record for editing photos from a trip, it seems appropriate to start this week off with an image from my recent week in Okinawa. Naminoue-gu is quite literally the “Shrine Above the Waves” — perched on a cliff overlooking one of the beaches in Naha. As dramatic settings for a religious structure go, this may be the best one I’ve ever seen.

Okinawa!

This is less coherent than I wanted it to be; I blame the narcotics. πŸ˜›

I went to Okinawa! As many of you know. The main purpose was a karate and kobudo (weapons) seminar; there was also time built in for sightseeing, which is relevant because Shihan’s planning to do another seminar in three years, but that one is intended to be all training, all the time. It is also possibly intended for a different time of year, because yare yare, the heat and humidity. I said I was going to be training in an un-airconditioned budokan; this turned out to be mostly not true, as Shihan got them to turn on the A/C for most of our scheduled training. But we also had one unscheduled afternoon block — about which more later — with nothing but a couple of very inadequate fans, so I got to experience something more like the full misery for at least a couple of hours. More than enough to be grateful it wasn’t the entire time, I can tell you that! (Though even with A/C, it was quite warm. Japan, unlike my home state of Texas, does not feel obliged to chill every indoor space to 55 degrees Fahrenheit.)

The prefectural budokan is an odd place: concrete walls studded with random bits of stained glass, highly functional but with lovely hardwood floors in most places, and then the exterior looks a bit like a stylized samurai helm. Our first day we shared the place with a swarm of children there for a tournament; we also saw a number of kendo groups come and go. It clearly gets plenty of use, and has three separate training halls as well as a weight room and a konbini and so forth. As for the training, it was both very intense and not. Each block was two hours long, usually without a break, and sometimes I was doing things like learning kusanku that drove me into the ground. But periodically Shihan would stop everybody to expound upon some point of technique or history, so you did at least get breathers. I suspect the experience was a bit more valuable for the people from Germany and Denmark and Spain and so on; people from our dojo get advice from Shihan on a regular basis, and are taught by people who are still being trained by him directly. The other RBKD dojo are a bit further removed, and so get that kind of guidance much more rarely. But it was very nifty to see them all, and to realize we truly are part of an international organization for the promotion of shorin-ryu karate.

Where sightseeing is concerned . . . I realized a while ago that I kept saying I was going to Okinawa, not to Japan. The difference matters. Those islands were only added to Japan in the relatively recent past, and culturally speaking, they have a lot of influences from Taiwan and China that make them distinct from the home islands (not to mention, of course, the indigenous Ryukyuan culture). We went to Shuri-jou, to Naminoue-guu, to Fukushuu-en, to the Churaumi Aquarium to see the whale sharks. We went to a small island called Kourijima, and that wound up not really working at all: I don’t know what happened, but we had nowhere near enough space for everybody who came. Shihan told us monks sleep on only one tatami mat; well, the American contingent had fourteen people in an eight-mat room, with no futon or even pillows. (Half the group ended up sleeping on the wooden porch; one of them got bit badly enough that he ended up going to the hospital to have the water blisters lanced.) So Kourijima got cut a day short, which is why we were back in Naha for an extra afternoon of training. But we were there long enough to have “beach training,” which Shihan ought to have called “ocean training” instead: he literally marched us into the water and made us do kata there. (It turns out that you can do the upper-body half of naifanchi shodan quite well while treading water.)

As instructed by my sister, I ate spam fried rice. I ate chanpuru (though not with goya). I ate Okinawan soba; I could not have avoided it if I tried, because it got served as a side dish with practically every meal I ordered. We got to see traditional Okinawan dancing at the welcome dinner; Shihan’s wife Tomoko-sensei is to Okinawan dancing what he is to karate, basically, though health issues mean she doesn’t practice regularly anymore. We bought CDs of traditional Okinawan music and also heard the same group sing “Let It Go” in Japanese. All in all, an excellent trip . . . except for the Kourijima part. πŸ˜›

And oh yes, there are pictures. Expect to see many of those in the days to come.

The Rocky Road to Recovery

So that twitch I mentioned yesterday? It recurred this morning, badly enough to catapult me straight out of sleep into grabbing my leg and yelping. Which worried me enough that I called the doctor and he had me come in for a quick examination at the end of their lunch hour.

Turns out all is well; I have been reassured that this is neither a result of something going wrong, nor likely to be a cause of it. The surgeon’s assistant theorizes that they aggravated some of the nerves in that area during the operation, which is why I’m in more pain generally than I was last time, and hurting even more when I twitch. The surgeon himself also mentioned that there’s been a new development in this procedure since I had it done on my right ankle: a teeny-tiny anchor he drilled into the bone to help secure the ligament. Which goes a long way toward explaining why the aftermath of this particular surgery is feeling more like my first one (when I was nine and they drilled into the bone) than my second (when I was twenty-nine and they didn’t).

Upshot is that I have a prescription for a muscle relaxant to take at night, and I’m no longer expecting to go off the Vicodin and onto Advil in the next day or two, like I did last time. In theory I was hoping to get back to work tomorrow, but we’ll see how much of my brain survives the barrage of drugs that “may make you drowsy” (read: will put me down for the count). Oh yeah, and I’m still getting over the jet lag. My plan of sleeping these issues off simultaneously is still going according to plan, at least.

Now begins the boring part

I’m back from Okinawa (about which more later), and as of this morning, I am done with the ankle surgery. But only with the surgery part of it: now I’m facing a month of incarceration in a plastic boot.

Since I’ve done this before, I have the dubious joy of knowing exactly what I’m in for. Though I’ve made at least one improvement this time around; putting one of my arch support inserts in the boot has done wonders for the circulation to my toes, which I remember as one of the chief miseries of the last round. On the other hand, this evening my foot twitched in a fashion that sent a bad enough spike of pain up my leg for me to call my orthopedist, except it was after office hours, so I probably won’t hear back from him until tomorrow. So that officially undoes all my happiness at the circulation thing. >_<

This is the most tedious part. I can’t do anything to speed my recovery; I can only (try to) avoid setting it back. In a month I’ll get to do PT, which will be a joy by comparison — please remind me of that when I’m suffering through it. πŸ˜› But at least the surgery itself is over, which is a relief.

A Year in Pictures – Kinkakuji

Kinkakuji
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When this posts, I will be on my way back from a week and a half long karate seminar in Okinawa. It seems a good day for this shot of Kinkakuji, the famous temple in Kyoto that is quite literally plated in gold. (There’s another one that was supposed to be plated in silver — Ginkakuji — but that one’s still just wood.) It’s kind of a refrackulous place, but undeniably photogenic.

A Year in Pictures – Memorial in the Wake

Memorial in the Wake
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The next time I take a picture like this one, I’ll have an easier time of it.

Hawaii was one of the last trips I took before I was in the habit of using Lightroom to edit my photos, which means I didn’t plan for the editing process in taking the shot. Which means I took about twenty-seven of these shots, trying to get one where the horizon was actually level — that wake you see is from the ferry I was riding in, so I kept being rolled in one direction or the other. In the future I can just take a wider shot without worrying as much about the framing, and then straighten it out in post.

quick Okinawa update

I have survived training! Most of it, anyway; maybe all. It’s unclear whether there will be more training on Kouri Island, which is where we’re going for the next couple of days. The schedule originally said yes, but the final version said no, and we’ve been told not to bring bo or sai or even gi. So if we are going to do more karate, it’ll be in swimsuits on the beach. Which would not be a bad thing . . .

Apart from the fact that I ended up learning kusanku yesterday (a kata I’m not supposed to know for another year or so, which involves dropping to a one-legged crouch three times and is absolute murder on your right quadricep and glutes), I think I’m in pretty good shape. Ankle isn’t bothering me much, though it was a bit bad on the first day — I think I blame the plane flight. Okinawa is hot and humid, but so far not as bad as it could have been. I’ve experimented with continuous shooting for stuff that’s moving (traditional Okinawan dancers; adorable ducklings), and therefore have vast quantities of photos to wade through and cull. I would try to make a more interesting post out of this, but my brain appears to have been chopped up for chanpuru. πŸ™‚

I should eat breakfast. And pack for Kourijima. Yeah.

A Year in Pictures – Ironwork Detail

Ironwork Detail
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I think I’d been to Nanzenji before, on my previous trip to Japan, but I wasn’t as much of a photographer then; I didn’t pay attention to small details, and wouldn’t have been able to control my camera to get the short depth of field I have here. It’s nice to know what you’re doing . . . .

A Year in Pictures – Iron Rail in Ivy

Iron Rail in Ivy
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I’m saving most of my Highgate Cemetery pictures for October, but here’s one that isn’t so much of a grave as a piece of a grave that fell off and landed in the ivy. (This is not difficult to achieve at Highgate. Missing the ivy when it fell would have been a remarkable achievement.)

A Year in Pictures – Monument Relief

Monument Relief
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When I took my husband to see the Monument to the Great Fire, the sun was at precisely the right angle for the light to reflect weirdly off some nearby windows and onto this sculpture that decorates one side of the Monument’s base — in the process making it much more visually interesting to me than it had ever been before.