Classic music

I went to my library in Atsugi and borrowed some classic CDs. One interesting piece 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky is remarkable. As the title implied, it's an orchestral piece commemorating the unsuccessful French invasion into Russia. The piece is known as gorgeous sequence of cannon fire. You can never listen to the cannon fire at concert halls in Japan because of the fire laws. So, you can enjoy original performing style of that only by CD. If you didn't know about this while listening to the piece, you would be surprised by sudden cannon fire. Therefore, each CD of that piece has warning like this.

Speaking of classic music, there is an orchestral suite, The Planets by Holst. Recently, The Planets' CD by Sir Simon Rattle with Berliner Philharmoniker has just come out. It has an extra adorable piece Pluto - it was composed by other hand in 2000 and Pluto was demoted the other day. That demotion has a major impact in every field.

Coming of Autumn

It's getting cooler and cooler these days. And it's becoming more and more like autumn. There is a nip of autumn in the air. I especially like crisp air and beautiful scenery of autumn. There are lots of fine autumnal activities such as hiking, camping and BBQ. Hiking is my most favorite activity in autumn. Planning autumnal activities is fun!

Mt.Fuji

I went to climb Mt.Fuji with my friend last Sunday. Even though I was raised in Shizuoka, I hadn't climbed Mt.Fuji thus far. Luckily, one of my friend gave us a ride to Kawaguchiko five station and I had another great friend who would climb Mt. Fuji together. Weather was getting fine and things were progressing favorably.

First, We got to the Kawaguchiko 5th Station at 8:15 the night. Weather was not bad at all. In fact, I had been worried about weather because the fog on the Fuji Subaru highway was too dense to see through.

We started climbing from the 5th Station (2305m). In the beginning of the trail, we were descending a gentle slope. It seemed it was pretty easy climbing. We were going up talking for a while, and soon we realized that talking make us exhausted. Especially, around the seventh station, The trail was getting rockier and steeper. I felt like the trail was getting much harder to climb. There were a lot of mountain huts on the way (I heard there were about 20 huts on the trail). You can sit down on a bench to take a break and you can also get something to eat and drink there. After we passed through second Torii, After about six hours climbing, we finally arrived at the summit(3776m). But we got to the summit much earlier than sunrise. We had to kill time for two and a half hours there. Changeable weather made me nervous, visibility would also be very rapidly reduced to near-zero if clouds rolled in. Luckily, we could see clear and beautiful sunrise. I took a lot of pictures of the sunrise.

After the amazing sunrise, we start to go down the Subashiri trail. The Subashi trail is about 6 km with a sand slide. I enjoyed the sand slide. It's much more fun and easier than climbing. It took us from the summit to to Subashiri fifth station about two and a half hours . The sights of Mt. Fuji from the Subashiri fifth station were magnificent and people at huts were very kind. I should mention that we were totally lucky, because there were no weather troubles nor human traffic jams and we didn't get high-altitude disease. It was a quite nice experience.

Snow Cone

Today, I made a cup of snow cone with melon syrup. It's very good for hot day like today.

Fireworks viewing party 2006

I held a fireworks viewing party on the patio last weekend. Twelve people came to my place. It was really fun and so nice! Some ladies were wearing beautiful yukata. Yukata goes well with Summer season in Japan. My Korean friend made Korean food Chijimi, and others brought Shiratama(a kind of Japanese sweets) and nice liquor. Those were much better than last fireworks party last year. Taking pictures of fireworks is very difficult. Actually, I took about 250 pictures of them, but about 70 percent of them were failure.