Birds of a feather

Spend any length of time in Japan, and you'll see crows. There are hardly any pigeons in all of Tokyo, but there are a few. These big crows rule the roost. Nets are thrown over the bags of rubbish in the mornings, (in a futile attempt) to stop the crows ripping open the bags before the collection people arrive. The crows are loud, and are not easily scared. In fact, I think that the local Japanese people are more scared of the crows than the crows are of them!

At first glance, they're evil looking black birds, but look closer and you'll see very clever animals, with feathers of a deep, midnight purple. I personally like the crows a lot, and will endeavour to take a close-up photo in the near future. Until then, I wanted to share this photo I took just before sunset, of two crows flying rather majestically across the autumn sky.

It's finally stopped raining

I was greeted by this beautiful sky this morning when I opened the curtains, and just had to take a picture (can you count the crows?). After living in Manchester for seven years I tend not to complain about rainy weather so often (it's nicknamed "The Rainy City" for a reason). However, it's been raining almost non-stop since last Friday night, when huge thunderstorms and quite insane amounts of rain (think tropical deluge) hit Tokyo and followed me all the way to Kyoto, where it remained until around 5pm on Sunday. 

Constant rain doesn't make for a good city-break, but we tried our best to get around and see some sights in Kyoto over the weekend. I'll publish the photos throughout the week.