I found more small shrines and temples in my neighborhood.

I have a fear of hairdressers, but I booked an apointment all by myself, and went there all by myself, and I was incredibly happy with the result. I am not sure if it is me or my hair, but Japan + my hair = disaster zone. It turns flat and fine and looks incredibly unhealthy. The cut did not make it perfect, but it looked a lot better.

And then I got a new BFF. We are still BFF. Pretty little thing.

I remembered that I had brought my old shoes with me to Japan, so I took the out of the closet. I still haven’t worn them much.

More pictures of the haircut.

I went to a hakubutsukan with my Japanese class.

They had gorgeous clothes and pretty games.

They showed the entire process of wood-block printing, the details were amazing.

Afterwards we went to a smaller sumo-hakubutsukan. These three were my favorite mawashi.

And then it was moving time. Good bye old apartment.

Bye bye Okubo.

And as any girl with a newly obtained MacBookPro – I had to take pictures of myself in the photo booth application.

I went to Canada, and I got to see Niagara Falls for the first time. It was absolutely unreal.

And there was quite a bit of waiting at the airport in Toronto, I entertained myself with free wifi and taking pictures of the art scattered around the airport with my iPhone.

There was lots of barbecues in Canada, and lots of cute street names.

I had never seen so many chipmunks running around in my entire life.

And people had crazy kitsch gardens.

I picked raspberries from the garden.

And almost went camping.

A lot of cigarettes were smoked on this porch.

And everybody else drank beer, while I was drinking wine.

I found this beautiful piece of art in Vancouver.

We went to the aquarium, and I always love aquariums that illuminate the jellyfish like this.

In July the pretty one took me to Yokohama. The feeling of Yokohama was very different than Tokyo, time went a bit slower, and there was much more space to move around.

We ate breakfast at Starbucks. I love coffee, but I rarely go to Starbucks. Maybe something is wrong with my tastebuds, but I don’t think Starbucks coffee is especially great.

Yokohama at night.

The moon was big.

And we went on the Ferris wheel.

And the observation tower. I always like to picture all the buildings as little models.

They had chandeliers and small aquariums in the observation tower.

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In June I got a nice care package, drank sparkling wine and looked at the beautiful sunset from the balcony.

I was strangely fascinated by Japanese electrical meters.

I posted pictures of myself to Lookbook.nu, but I realized that I wasn’t very good at taking pictures of my outfits that often.

Crazy neighbors had decorated their entire little garden with figurines.

In May the roses were really beautiful around my neighborhood.

And we went to Katsunuma Wine Cave, where I tasted some, well, pretty awful Japanese wines. I still have not found amazing Japanese wine, if anyone knows of a brand or style of wine from Japan which is drinkable I would love to know.

The vines looked nothing like Europe.

Japanese countryside!

We went on yakatabune! We ate monjayaji and looked at the Rainbow bridge and Odaiba from the boat.

The neighbors did some decorating outside their door.

And I saw a blimp!

And this made me feel like I was in California. I love palm trees, maybe because I never saw them much as a child, they always seemed exotic to me, and reminded me of being on holiday and warm weather.

In April there was hanami. The cherry blossom trees were absolutely stunning, and I was walking around in a pink daze trying to take pictures of them all. Everywhere I went, it seemed like there was an even prettier tree with even more petals than the ones I had photographed already.

Hanami only lasts for a short time, and soon the ground was covered in petals.

And all the other flowers were really blossoming as well.

I never knew how many different kinds of cherry trees there were.

I found small temples and shrines and took pictures of the statues and flowers there as well. Tokyo is so busy, and then you enter through these gates, and all of a sudden everything goes quiet and peaceful.

In March we went to Tokyo Disneyland, and all the buildings were beautiful.

I loved all the pretty scenery, but was going slightly mental over all the cutesy music playing everywhere.

We went on a riverboat cruise.

And for a moment I thought I saw real animals, before I realized that their movements were repetitive. Disney had done a good job.

Later that month, I went to Harajuku. I never go to Harajuku, and I can not even remember what I did there, but I remember the happy balloons at the entrance to Takeshita dori.

In February, we went to see sumo. It was my first time.

It was a lot more fun that I thought it would be, and I thought their mawashis were so pretty.

And I laughed when I saw the commercial for McDonald’s during the breaks.

I bought new, cheap shoes that broke quite fast, but they were sparkly and pretty for a month or so. I went to the Mori Arts Center and saw the exhibition “Medicine and Art”, it was creepy and eerie and beautiful. The picture above shows a real human body, well, a thin slice of it at least, between two glass plates.

And oranges! There were oranges on the trees everywhere.

“Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.”

— Carl Sagan