NISMO Festival 2008

Saturday 29th November was going to be another wedding ring window shopping day but a miracule happened on this day - we found a shop where Emi found an engagment ring we both liked, a wedding ring we both liked and... I found a ring I liked! The previous week I hadn't seen anything that floated my boat so we were both surprise I found something. So we ordered them and would go to collect them after they had been made.

Sunday we went to Fuji Speedway for the NISMO festival. NISMO is Nissan Motorsport, Nissan's official motorsport division and this year was celebrating 50 years since Nissan's first competitive event. There were many historical Nissan racing cars: IMSA winning sports prototype, British Touring Car Championship (BTCC) winning Primera, R390 which came 2nd, 3rd and 4th at LeMans in the late 90's and several GTR and 350Z Japanese Grand Touring Championship (JGTC) racing cars including the 2008 winning car. Even his royal highness Carlos Ghosn, Nissan/Renault CEO came along to make a speech.

Again I took lots of pictures, many of them poor (including perfect focus of a fence post when trying to catch a GTR JGTC car!) and also purchased something a little different. They were selling off all the NISMO 2008 merchandice but also used/broken racing car parts. There was quite a choice of 350Z JGTC front wings, broken GTR plastic windscreens etc but I was interested in the used wheels. I always wanted to make a motorsport themed coffee table using an F1 wheel as the base with a glass pane on top but F1 wheel go for £100 or more. This place were selling JGTC wheels for £50 to be picked up after the event of £25 quid if you took them there and then. So after spending £25 I had a pleasant 15min walk to the car with a 18x13" wheel. At 9kg it is light for a wheel that size but still 9kg of difficult-to-carry-wheel so i was pretty tired and my arms were aching for days!

Pictures, pictures, pictures

Saturday 22nd November Emi and I headed off to Tokyo to do some serious window shopping - we went looking for engagement and wedding rings! I had no idea what I liked so wanted to look at various examples to make sure that I chose something for me that I liked and matched with Emi's rings. Obviously Emi's engagement and wedding rings had to match each other also. We looked at 3 or 4 shops, spending so long in one with Emi chatting that I nearly fell asleep standing up!

Afterwards it was late so we looked for somewhere to have dinner. Wondering around the back streets of Ginza we stumbled upon an italian style resturant and decided to give it a go. Well it was an inspired choice, the food was really really nice, we were very pleased we had found it.

Sunday we picked up Emi's mother and went to Miyagase lake to do some picture taking. We walked around different parts of the main vistor area taking various pictures, all the while learning about using my still relatively new camera. I'm quite pleased with the results but still need lots of practice!

Quiet weekend for Stuart...

Saturday 15th November Emi went to her friends wedding so I was on my tod. I didn't do very much, the only thing of note was playing on my PC so not very exciting!
Sunday wasn't much more interesting I'm afraid - walked around Uniglo (clothes shop), Virgin and Emi bought a wedding magazine. However the magazine was about 2" thick so was very heavy so I had to carry it home as Emi couldn't!

Autumn Leaves

Saturday 8th November Emi desided she would change her hair. She went to a salon to have a "digital perm". I still don't understand exactly what it means but it took several hours to do it. It did look nice but only lasted for a few days or a week maximum before it lost it's perminess (if that is a word).

Sunday we went to Lake Kawaguchi. At autumn time when the leaves change colour the Japanese head out to the country side in droves to look at all the pretty trees. One thing I like about Japanese culture is there almost child-like wonder and excitment about nature such as autumn leaves or having parties in spring when the cherry blossum comes out. I found when I returned to Japan after my last visit that I had a much greater appriciation of nature than before, many a time on the way home from work in the UK I would look up at the beautiful sunsets like I hadn't previously. Sorry for my digression!

The weather was grotty and the traffic predictably bad (on the way home at least) but the trees were beautiful and the food we ate in a resturant at lunchtime was very nice.

I hope you like the pictures.