「紅葉」 or "It's fall. The trees are dying. Yay."

The Japanese celebrate the changing seasons like... well, like the Japanese celebrate the changing of the seasons. Partly, I think it's an excuse to party and generally make merry and, more importantly, imbibe some final alcohol before it's too damned cold to go buy beer. In any case, trees changing color is a Big Deal here. Photographers come out in troves, and festivals are had all around the city on every other day. If you imagine Leavenworth, but with 1.5 million people living in it, you have the right idea.

Anyway, I'm here, so I have to take pictures of the trees going into a coma or people look at me funny - er, funnier? I don't know.

Fine, it's an excuse to take pictures. Here's what I got today, whatever the reason.

This (above) was a place that looked nice and was on the way, so I stopped to take some test shots. It started raining just as I was finishing up, so I hurried to get packed up and move on.

Totally random trees. I photoshopped this one pretty hard, and I'm not so great with Photoshop, so there are quite a few artifacts, but if you look at it like this, it looks good enough.

Don't worry, I don't intend to put all the pictures up in this massively space-consuming fashion, but I spent a long time between taking these four and doing the post work, so they're getting the annoying treatment.

Random bridge where I took advantage of my waterproof boots to tromp around in a shallow river that runs through town and get this picture. Boots, boots. I didn't like the view from on the bridge is why, in case you're wondering.
I'm kind of kicking myself for not getting the left-side pillar, but it looks really weird if I crop out the right-side one, so...

This is one of places we've done parties, and it was my goal for heading out to the middle of nowhere. I saw some friends boating along, so I photosniped them and headed to where I thought they were going and helped pull them ashore and got to show off my super-cool waterproof boots. Muahaha. Danner boots: Mmm, mmm, good! No, seriously!

And now is time for yet another picture spam.
Really, there's not that much to be said for momiji ("crimson leaves") 'cause I think almost everyone in a temperate climate knows what fall looks like.
Random flower picture, because it was required. It's a shibazakura, which means someone thinks it looks like a cherry blossom. Kind of.

(Far left) Probably the prettiest single tree I saw, and it was a Japanese maple, which my mom seems to have some kind of fetish for, so, again, required.

Some more pictures taken while tromping around in the river. Dunno what the weed-ish things at the bottom arm, but they looked kind of wheat-y. The far right tree looks... like I need to leave the 9th grade.

Still tromping around in the not-quite-a-river, I found this random fish and about six of his buddies. I wasn't sure it was a real dead fish until I poked it with my shoe. It felt real enough. And no, I don't know why someone would scatter fake dead fish around. It's Japan; you never know.

Mun, the guy at the paddles, finally squinted at me in recognition, so I gave myself up and waved at them. They went and bought some random sweet wine and passed it around.
Some more people came, and we took a bunch of pictures, and my tripod got passed around like...

In any case, I need new similes.