Daley-sensei's Adventures in Himeji, Japan.

This weekend I had two consecutive day trips! On Saturday, November 9th, I went to Aioi to watch a swordsmith make a katana and viewed the Scarecrow Festival; I also went on a bit of a hike, and visited an art museum! Aioi was about an hour away from Shirasagi by car. It was at a higher altitude, so it was a bit chilly in the morning. Once the sun came out, though, it got much more comfortable! The autumn leaves were absolutely stunning; there's nothing quite like seeing mountainsides dotted with colorful trees! The entrance to a main area of Aioi.  The view from the window of the smithy.  The swordsmith at work! He was a junior apprentice, which meant he had to do all the work himself, using this machine to pound the steel. Apparently the grand masters are allowed to have apprentices pound the steel manually for them.  A pond outside the smithy! A watermill fed into it.  An ivy-covered house!  Starting a hike to view a shrine in the mountain behind

I visited Mt. Shosha over the three-day-weekend! It was quite a climb; thankfully there were walking sticks you could borrow for free at the bottom. It had just stopped raining a few hours before, so everything was still very misty and very slippery. I took tons of pictures, but the mist made the lighting tricky, so not too many of them came out. My camera skills are improving, but it's a definite work in progress! At the start of the trip, at the base of the mountain, a man let us into his backyard to see his traditional Japanese Garden. This was a moss garden; the green stuff on the ground isn't grass, it's moss.  The garden was so beautiful, it was hard to believe it was just his backyard.  It was a work of art, in my opinion!   Here's a shot of the trail up the mountain, probably the easiest part of it. It was mostly dominated by precarious switchbacks with rocky paths, that were, of course, slippery from the rain.   Once you got to