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@chadkoh — Generous with Likes ❤️

Author: Chad Kohalyk

  • Impressions of Lisbon

    Impressions of Lisbon

    My first trip to Europe was pretty easy. Not the getting there — that part was actually pretty difficult. I flew through Heathrow, but leaving Haneda the plane flew east over the Pacific Ocean, north between Kamchatka and Alaska, through the Bering Straight and then over the Arctic. In order to avoid Russian airspace four…

  • Visiting the Kyoto State Guest House

    A few years ago one of the members of Writers in Kyoto shared a broadcast from NHK’s Core Kyoto S05E02 Kyoto State Guest House: Hospitality Imbued with Beauty and Craftsmanship. This is a special compound located in the Kyoto Imperial Palace but run by the Cabinet Office. It is where the Japanese government receives foreign…

  • Minamiza

    Took a walk up the Kamogawa tonight and saw Minamiza, the theatre where all the kabuki greats have been performing for the the past hundred years.

  • 6 months an upāsaka

    At the beginning of the year I undertook a commitment to take my Buddhist learning to the next level by becoming an upāsaka, or “lay devotee.” Last fall I applied to and was accepted into the upāsikā program at Birken, the Thai Forest Monastery near Kamloops where I have attended a couple of different meditation…

  • On Shijō this afternoon the Naginata-hoko is going up. Look at the rope work and the size of some of the posts! #gion #祇園祭 #kyoto

  • Such a glorious day today in #kyoto 😁 Hope you all had a lovely Tanabata 🎋

  • The End

    Cross-posting the greeting from this month’s edition of my newsletter, since it is of personal significance. The last day of June. A Real Feel™️ of 42 degrees celsius. Not even summer yet. But things started to settle down this month. We took the kids to Universal Studios Japan. Summer Camp started. Screen time decreased. I…

  • My neighbourhood has a lot of Buddhist craftspeople. They make altar fittings, carve statues, etc. One warehouse is used for cleaning parts of temples. I pass by every day and there is some new chunk of a temple that has been hauled over to be cleaned and repaired, before it is sent back to be…

  • Blowing away your sins

    Although we live in downtown Kyoto, we are somehow still within the precinct of Fushimi Inari, the mountain shrine south of the city with all the torii gates (some photos from our hike up there a couple years ago →). The other day, to my surprise, an envelope arrived unbidden from that famous shrine. It…

  • Rainy remembrance

    Rainy remembrance

    In the rain today I walked to Bukkō-ji 佛光寺, an important temple in the centre of Kyoto for Shinran, the founder of Shin Buddhism. I am not a temple member, but this is the neighborhood temple. In a famously gridded city, its grounds are the local shortcut. Every day we walk diagonally through Bukko-ji to…