Old Japan

Today we went out for a ride on our bicycles. Went a lot further than we'd planned and ended up at the Saitama Farming Museum. Very relaxing though small place. Basically, a few old farm buildings salvaged from around Saitama and lovingly refurbished and laid out according to the plan of an old farming hamlet of a couple of hundred years ago. There are fish ponds, mini rice paddies and various farming implements of the long blunt stick type. The weather was beautiful, and the overall atmosphere about as idyllic as a Hayao Miyazaki animated movie. Beautiful day, but didn't actually get a lot of photography done. Will definitely be going back again though :)

Ring of Fire Eclipse

Not quite relating to the 'animal' theme of this blog, but certainly falling into the area of nature's wonders, we enjoyed the rare spectacle of an eclipse over Tokyo a couple of days ago. I skipped work for the morning to watch the the event at Professor Ewan's school, enjoying the 'ring of fire' type eclipse almost as much as watching the elementary students run around like demented lemurs as the sky got darker.

And talking of lemurs, the ring tail variety at the famous Ueno Zoo in Tokyo apparently went into a frenzy as the sky got darker, jumping around and displaying the kind of behavior that is normal for them during nighttime. Certainly reveals our primate roots if you compare lemurs to 10 year olds ;)

It's quite probable that a lot of other wildlife in Japan displayed unusual behavior as well during the eclipse. However, I'm sure that this would have escaped notice as practically the entire population of Japan were looking at the heavens, or of course their home grown lemurs!