My friend Madoka and I were talking about ruins, not an easy task in limited language interaction, when she told me about an island near Nagasaki that used to be some kind of coal mining town. On this little island, an entire city sprang up… school, hospital, pachinko parlor, factories, and living quarters, and it was a bustling little town.

Then it closed down.

Here is its sad, concise little story. Nothing too remarkable…

Until you look at the photos of the place. A tropical island slowly reclaiming a ghost city… hauntingly beautiful stuff. These are japanese website, so navigation is a little tricky, but there’s enough english in places to help you if you need it.

First site
Second site

I wrote an essay my last year of college about another ruins photographer, Sean O’Boyle. If the previous stuff thrilled you, check out this guy’s stuff.

So if anyone knows my parents, they know that they are OUTSTANDING cooks. This post is for them.

Hungry, but a bit bored, I decided to do a bit of cooking. Ducked into the grocery store near my home, picked up some spinach and bean sprouts, and a packet of what was surprisingly cheap chicken strips.

Started pan-frying the chicken, when I realized how symmetrical the strips were, and how they seemed to be creased exactly down the middle. Didn’t pay more attention, went to make the salad.

Began tearing up the spinach and I realized that I needed to put the salad in something… there was far more vegetable matter than I was going to eat in a single sitting, I could eat half for lunch tomorrow. What to keep it in? A-ha, a large tupperware bowl I have, big enough to toss the salad AND keep the uneaten half fresh overnight. Problem is, the bottom is covered in chocolate-chip cookie crumbs from the batch my folks brought with them (ate all the cookies, but never got around to cleaning out the crumbs).

Flipped the meats around, then took the bowl and started for the garbage can on the balcony, when I realized… “Shit… cookie crumbs and fragments… that’s almost like croutons, isn’t it?” So I left it all in there, added the spinach and sprouts, and just tossed all of it together. Heaped half on a plate, poured balsamic vinegar on it, and voila! Cookie-crumb spinach salad.

Pulled the chicken out of the pan and threw it on the plate next to my incredibly resourceful salad. Looked closely and realized why it had such a bizarre appearance… I do believe they were chicken spines. Or rather, the muscle around the spine, or something. Nothing bony in them at all, but certainly exceptionally chewy.

So, to my parents, some of the best cooks I know: Thank you for your culinary skills! They run strong in my blood, as evidenced by my fantastic meal of

Chicken-spines and Vinegar Cookie Salad.

We groggily woke up the next morning on our greasy cardboard, and noticed many of the employees were still working there. The guy at the snack counter looked like he was going to literally pass out and fall over.

We packed our shtuff and went outside, where another old dad and his teenage son picked us up. The dude’s English was really quite good despite his missing incisors, but teeth aren’t critical to linguistic knowledge. Apparently he had bussed all across the States in his younger days, thus the solid grasp of the language.

He dropped us off at a train station that we could take to our destination. He even bought us McDonald’s for no discernable reason (psychologists call this malady ‘generosity’). The train took us to a quaint little neighborhood where people were selling items in exchange for currency.

We reached the temple/park mountain, the place Abs wanted to see more than anywhere else. It was famous for its rows and rows of orange torii gates.

You can see how delighted Abs is to be there. There were literally a couple miles worth of tracks up the mountain that were housed underneath these gates, as you can see below:

So we climbed these really visually impressive trails up to the top of the mountain, avoiding the creepy black wasps that seemed to be swarming the place. We overlooked Kyoto from the top, and then began our descent, and stumbled upon a random wonder:

This place was huge, I mean bigger than your grandmother’s head. You can see the tiny white speck of a person to the bottom right of the temple. Kyoto is full of temples littered around the city like discarded coke cans, so its no surprised we stumbled upon this. We were lucky that it happened to be such an enormous building. I was able to peek inside, and in the darkness I saw a gigantic golden Buddha, whom I imagine Moses would have been very disapproving of.

We left the temple and walked out into the street where they had a parade waiting to welcome Abs and me. It was quite an honor, they even busted out their samurai.

By that time the whole neighborhood was really thrilled to have two distinguished visitors like ourselves arrive, so they had their kids break out their karate gear and what I imagine are karate flutes and paraded by us, playing an impressive mix of Abs’ national “God Save the Queen” and my own nation’s anthem, “We Will Rock You.”

Kyoto, like a pantless trenchcoated man in the park, had more to show us!