Soon after returning from Hokkaido I was greeted with a visit from Daneland in the form of Dr. Lemke and thus I took another few days off work to travel Japan with my distinguished guest. The following days brought us across mainland Japan to Kansai and back, with many a random encounter on the way, not forgetting the Jazz-savvy bartender of Pontocho, working away at his tiny bar that seemed to be made up entirely of a chaotic collection of boxes, fans, books, old records, and other knickknacks seemingly accumulated over several decades. Or the company president we met in a hot spring on top of Mount Kurama that bore an uncanny resemblance to Mr. Burns of The Simpsons and was about to hire us both once he'd learned that we were both engineers (is that what we call ourselves?)
Whether Lemke returned to Denmark with the firm belief that all barbecue restaurants in Japan force you to dress up as ninjas and/or superheroes I do not know. Either way you can see the rest of the pictures I took during his stay here, but to be honest you are probably better off looking at Lemke's version.
Soon after Lemke left, cherry blossom season came to Japan and with it another set of obligatory "hanamis". I believe I write about hanami EVERY year so I think I will just leave you with the picture above and congratulate myself that I now have only 7 months left to go before I catch up to "now"!