I was pleasantly surprised with a belated birthday care package on Monday that was overflowing with Hi-Chew (my dentist is pleased, I’m sure), a nice birthday card, and long-awaited photos from our travels to Japan earlier this summer. I’m glad that so many of my friends and I could meet up in Japan, especially since collectively we had 8 cameras between all of us, and were bound to capture (nearly) every aspect of out trip. I’m such a picky photographer that I always err on the side of caution and  take less photos than I should. I just get self conscious about whipping out that huge DSLR for every little thing that happens, and of course I regret it later, because it’s so much harder to reconstruct stories and get the idea across to people later. Pictures are worth about a thousand words, eh? Well, this is one of the times that I’m glad that I have friends who have less restraint with the camera, because looking at these photos I’m getting a whole memoir’s worth of stories all over again. But, of the few photos that I did manage to take, this one of Asakusa is one of my favorites. I love night time shots because of how serene and pretty everything looks under the glow of a few choice lights. It certainly gives the place a distinctly different feel; Asakusa is this crowded  marketplace during the day, and it’s so hard to get a clear shot of the temples and architecture amidst the tourists and school groups – but at night, the hustle and bustle atmosphere just absolutely dissolves; the shops are boarded up for the night (with rather random artwork adorning the boards), and the whole place is replaced with this calm – the only people around the area are students biking  home from school, or old people walking around in traditional looking robes, or homeless bums just lounging around the benches. Gotta love it.