One thing which amuses / confuses people who have started learning Japanese is the word "ao". It is pronounced something like "ow" as in "ow, you just stepped on my foot" and written with the character 青. It means "blue".....

.....and "green" (that's where the confusion comes in). The first time a foreigner hears a Japanese state that the traffic light is "ao", they tend to do a double take because Japanese has an entirely separate word for "green", which is "midori" or 緑 and which does not ever refer to blue in any way at all. So you have a character which means "blue", but can also mean "green", and you have a different character which means "green" but has nothing to do with blue. Clear as mud, isn't it?

There's a somewhat long winded reason behind this, but as this is not a linguistics blog, I'll leave it out. However, it does segue into the theme of this entry. Over the Golden Week period (a sequence of public holidays which typically add up to a week off, but with the enthronement of the new Emperor, this year's was 10 full days) I went to two places which were full of blue and green. One was a very large park called the Showa Kinenbi Koen, which was very nice indeed, and one was a mountain by the name of Mitake, which was for the most part a considerable disappointment. Most of the pictures are therefore from the former. In any case, hope you like them!

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While I was generally not particularly impressed with Mt Mitake, it did provide one pretty nice picture, with which I will round off this article.

More articles should be forthcoming in a week or two.

Thanks for looking!