This is how I Japan: is it finally winter?

So here I am, freezing to death although the temperature hasn't even dropped down to 0°C yet. The unreasonably hot autumn played its tricks on me, and now my body's imagining this is cold. The day before yesterday we went to Arashiyama for the Lantern Festival, and walked around for a few hours; I was freezing. Imagine how it felt like afterwards when we took a foot bath at the station before returning home - pure bliss! Although the first feeling was that of my feet burning, since the water in baths here is pretty much as hot as it's possible to have without actually getting burns.

Anyways, before these adventures, and some Christmas preparations I'm planning to tell you about, let's go back a week or two, when the momiji season reached its peak. I got up really early one morning to capture the last of the autumn colors around the Imperial Palace, and here are a few selected shots. A few more can be found on Flickr again, since I don't really like to use Blogger for publishing all the photos - first of all, I think it's inconvenient for the reader to scroll down and click on each photo separately to see the full size; and if you just look through them in the photo viewer that opens up when you click on one, you miss any writings that might be between them. And second, I don't even know how to adjust the copyright settings here, and in Flickr it's automatically "all rights reserved", and you can adjust it any way you want.

A perfect, crispy morning for photography!

Later during the same day, we baked gingerbread cookies! I used the recipe that's originally my aunt's, I think; but as the ingredients you can get here are a bit different, I was slightly nervous to see how they turn out. For example, dark syrup is apparently a Nordic thing. Molasses is probably quite similar, as I've seen that being used in English gingerbread dough recipes, but I opted for kuromitsu, which roughly translates to black honey. It's muscovado sugar syrup mixed with honey, and it did indeed taste very similar to dark syrup. Another tricky one was the flour - they sell two kinds of wheat flour here, strong and weak one, and I wasn't sure at all how that compares with the Finnish fine and coarse wheat flours, but I chose the strong one. I did end up using a bit less of it compared to the original recipe, so I'm not sure if the weak one would've been a better option after all, but otherwise there was no difference in how it turned out at the end. The taste was also exactly the same, and even though I haven't really gotten to Christmas mood here since outside it looks like October in Finland, the moment we started baking I was filled with Christmas spirit. It's the magical mixture of cloves, ginger and cinnamon that does it.