Monthly Archive for July, 2013

In Japan, the month of June and the start of July are what’s called “Tsuyu” or rainy season. It’s considered a bad time for tourism, obviously, but it actually does not rain everyday. Fortunately, this year’s been pretty descent; we still had a few days of rain here and there, but they weren’t too bad.

I love photographs of the rain, but it’s pretty hard to photograph the rain; I tried a lot and got a few interesting shots with my iphone. This week’s “photo of the week” is a photo of a man on his bicycle, carrying an umbrella while waiting at the train crossing near our house. It’s not an unusual sight when you live in Japan, to see people riding a bicycle while holding an umbrella; some even manage to text on the top of that! It must be what’s called “Japanese efficiency”…

Other photos on this theme.

Eager to immerse myself into the culture, I recently started downloading Japanese apps on my phone. I mean, this is also a cultural experience, right? Following my friends’ advice, I downloaded the popular weather app, ‘Line Tenki’. Seriously, I did not know looking at the weather forecast could be so much fun… Not only does it give you the forecast for the day in a super cute way, using the great Line characters in specific situations that illustrate today’s weather, but it also tells you whether today’s a good day for laundry or if you’d better accept that today’s going to be the perfect day to listen to the beautiful sound of rain. Below is a slideshow of the weather forecast on random days…