7 year service

It's hard to believe that seven years has passed since FIL's death, and a lot has happened since then.

We got together for his 7 year service and then had lunch at Kyoto Hyatt's Touzan.

All the dishes were delicious and used a lot of seasonal ingredients.

The dessert was a sakura mochi and had cherry blossom petals in it. Super refreshing and unusual!

There was way more food, it is just that I was too busy eating...ha!

The weather was nice and it was a nice gathering. I think MIL was glad that everything went smoothly.

We miss you FIL!

colors of kyoto

Sunday was a beautiful day.

We headed out early to Kyoto to check out some fall foliage as well as visit our family grave.

We checked out Tofukuji because it is closest to our family grave site.

Apparently everyone had the same idea because even though it was early, the place was packed!

It was actually pretty crazy, people pushing and shoving, not really nice and you couldn't "enjoy" the foliage.

This is part of the reason we don't like to check out festivals in Japan. There are just too many people and for the most part you are almost always fighting your way through the crowds.

So after fighting the crowds at Tofukuji, we headed to our family grave site.

On the way, we stumbled across a pottery festival.

For this pottery festival, they also had a "stamp rally" where you visit various shops and get a stamp, when you collect all the stamps (10 in all), you can enter a "drawing".

> So we visited the various shops and got some stamps which were along the way to where we actually needed to go.

After visiting the family grave, we then finished getting the rest of our stamps.

Many homes had kiku (chrysanthamum) decorating their doorsteps.

Really pretty this time of year.

We picked up these two tiny bowls and from the "drawing" we received these 2 chopstick rests.

I really liked the glazing on these bowls, it reminded me of fish scales.

We then visited MIL for a very late lunch. She is doing fine though she still cannot sit on the floor or walk very far.

Going back to Osaka, we were lucky to ride the Kyo-train. A fancied up Hankyu train which runs only 4 times a day during the weekends and holidays.

The outside of the train has this beautiful fan.

Despite the crowds, we were lucky to have such nice weather and we got to see lots of beautiful foliage.

sennyuji

Near Higashiyama, Kyoto is Sennyuji. A temple that is somehow related to the Imperial family.

On the grounds of the temple, is another smaller temple which Satoshi's family has a gravesite. In Japan, most people have connections to temples for several generations.

Through a different temple, this was how we found out about our ancestors on my maternal grandfather's side and were able to trace relatives all the way back to the Edo period (about 1600-1860).

Anyway, I wanted to show you this beautiful, white mokuren (a type of magnolia), which was along the path to the temple in Kyoto. All the leaves fall off during winter and these flowers appear in Spring.

Have a good week!