That explains it!

My wee bookworms

My wee bookworms
Originally uploaded by Gunnella73.

Only in Japan

Square watermelon anyone?
Originally uploaded by Gunnella73.

Square watermelon anyone?

Apart from the square watermelons and the 50 £ honey melons one of the things I find thoroughly fascinating aginst my own will is the length they'll go to here to torture their poor dogs. All over the place there are pet shops selling tiny puppies all caged alone in plastic cages. Some shops like for instance the one in Roppongi is open until 5 in the morning so you can imagine the people stumbling in there post partying swooping up a "cute" accessory only to .. well you get the gist.
The poor things nearly never seem to be walked but carried around in knapsacks on peoples' fronts or backs and when it rains they have their heavy raincoats on and lets not forget the wee boots in winter.... Can anyone say substitute....!

Anyways what I was getting at was that although I find this atrocious yet sinistarly mesmerizing, the sheer amount of costumes they have on sale for their pets is astounding, dresses, leiderhosen, leather jackets, clown costumes to name a few but my favorite by far have to be the traditional costumes. Yukatas and obis (summer kimonos and wraps for the uninitiated) abound and now that it's matsuri season (festival) of course you have the Matsuri get ups as well.... even going so far as to include traditional seeimng edo period wigs!!!

Rising head and shoulders over the revellers ;-)

Rising head and shoulders over the revellers ;-)
Originally uploaded by Gunnella73.

Just had a full house for the past couple of weeks, great fun, and amazingly enough not so tight, I guess the saying "throngt geta sattir setid" applies ;-) i.e. intelligent, friendly, charming (buttering things up here a bit ;-) can survive tight tatami matted quarters for short periods of time (Icelandic is an amazingly succinct language).
My friend Svava and her daughter Hilda Margret came first and we were then joined by John Paul and Lizzie from Scotland so it was a tad tight I:ll be the first to admit, but hey a better excuse for going out to dinner each night I`ve still to come accross!!
Anyways here are a couple of pics but are to be found in my July set as well as on Svavas blog page along with a few travel stories (admittedly in Icelandic).