Picture Wandering

So, this isn't the first picture that I took while I was down by the river, but it's one of my favorites. I'll only be posting a few pictures in the post itself, but you're welcome to check out the gallery page for more of the pictures I took while I was wandering around yesterday.
Anyway.
So this dog is, if I remember right, a "kitaben" type. Apparently it's native to Japan, or at least according to the woman walking said dog. The dog's name is "Maru", which means circle.
Japanese people with dogs are usually those that have quite the pile of money to toss around (I suspect!), as dogs require large open spaces to be happy, and large open space comes at a bit of a premium here in Kyoto. Because fewer people own dogs and those that do are usually upper-class (from what I've seen), they are much more likely to have their pet professionally groomed fairly often compared to what you might expect as an American. I dunno if that's actually the case, but the important point here is that all the dogs are so soft.
As much as the might think the Japanese are, in general, less litterbugful (?) than Americans, this park should tell you that they're not, or at least not by much.
This is just a random can that was floating in the river and I liked the way it was bobbing around, but there was quite the plethora of random litter. Strangely enough, it seems as though many people pick up after themselves, bag the whole thing up, then just leave it there. I'd say about half of the random litter I found was in such a state.

If you take a look at the panorama shot that'll be at the end of this post, you'll understand this sign better, as it's posted by those rocks that make the rapids.
It reads:

Danger
Playing in the water here
is danger!!

and I didn't bother to lookup the kanji on the bottom, but at a glance I would guess that it reads something along the lines of Published by the Katsura River Foundation for Putting Signs Up Everywhere, except that it's on the ground, so it probably took them a year to file an internal Request to Put a Sign Down Somewhere request or something.

Here's a guy I saw on the way back to my bike. As you can see, he's simply too hardcore to use one fishing pole at a time.
This makes me think we need a new match time for Halo 2: fishduels. It would totally be a no-shields match, and would involve large fish and slapping. IRC-style.
It'd be hardcore.

This guy, who called himself Nishimura, apparently trains in kenpo. As far as I can tell, that's the Japanese word for kung fu, because the Japanese don't want to admit that they got most of their martial arts from the Chinese, who have a long history of kicking ass.
His dog, Mame, is the same breed as the dog from earlier, but he said it was different, and that this breed "used to protect Japan from nothing". Presumably, something was lost in translation here.
Anyway, we sat around and talked for about fifteen minutes while Mame wandered around was apathetic. I took this next picture while I was talking to him.
If Bethany is to be trusted, mame (まめ) means bean, but I was wondering if there was a slightly less silly meaning for it, so I tossed it at a dictionary. I suspect the first entry I found is the meaning Nishimura intended, as he said at one point "The bond between Nishimura and Mame... It's there. Between Mame and other people there is nothing." I think he said this to cheer me up as I was trying to get Mame's attention so I could scratch his/her head, but s/he was busy sniffing dirt.
I didn't know the meaning of it at the time, and didn't think to ask, so Bethany is as likely to be right as not.


And here's my obligatory sunset picture.


Isn't it pretty?



Good. Moving on, then...

Here's the last one.

I spent an hour this morning trying to get this to stitch properly, but in the end, I failed. It's decent enough, but I've got another 90 degrees of view I could tack on the right side if the connecting shot had exposed properly. The sunset kind of freemed the exposure on my camera, as you can see, but I was able to mostly recover things. The sky above the stuff in the SW looked too nice to crop out, so you get weird grey matting where I didn't have any picture to put.

As a last note, in case you're wondering (I was), the gallery has about every 6th picture I took. I mean, on average. According to my Excel math, it's actually 6.6296, but about every 6th is good enough, unless you're talking to KMD, who would bitch that you couldn't shoot it at a satellite without compromising its pie. Or something.
In case any of you didn't know, Dan's not allowed in the kitchen when people are cooking. God forbid he actually touch something.