august weekend rituals

No hot and sunny August weekend afternoon can be complete without a generous slice or two of good watermelon - or so I say. Shall we take this handsome watermelon with us under the sun...





yum!

I've done this before: soaking a watermelon with alcohol. Last time (which was last summer) I did it with vodka, and it was fun. But I remembered a tip-off from the very friend who I had heard this vodka-in-watermelon (or should I say watermelon-in-vodka?) method from: you can do it with champagne, as well. Now I love champagne better than any other alchohol including vodka, so I was determined to try it. And I have waited for a whole year, until the watermelon season is nearly over.

One typical afternoon of a hot summer weekend a couple of weeks back, I dashed to the store and got a handsome 10-lb watermelon, and a Freixenet, a Spanish sparkling wine. I know this isn't a champagne, but I went with it because, well, it seemed reasonably good. And I knew it is a safely good bubbly.

Like I did last year, we tried to cut out a top part of the watermelon to pour the wine in, but figured out it wouldn't work, since the flesh of our watermelon was - as is the case with any good watermelon in Japan - pretty solid and dense, and wouldn't absorb the liquid so much. So we ended up cutting slices out of the watermelon and just poured wine over the slices as we ate. It worked good enough, and it was sure delicious. This was such a refreshing treat on a hot summer day.

(this last shot is by my sis - thanks Yuka!)

Watermelon aside, I have few things I like about summer, especially the lousy hot-and-super-humid one like we have in Tokyo. And one of the few things I do like definitely is fireworks. Starting in the mid July and through August, fireworks shows are a big thing in Japan, and every weekend there are fireworks somewhere in town. Major ones are really spectacular - tens of thousands of firework pieces would lit up the dark sky for a period of an hour or so.

Last weekend there was one near our place. I was taking a nap in that evening, and the thunderous roar got me up. I got out onto a balcony, and saw it going on.

We eventually went outside and watched the fireworks near our place. I tried to capture some of them with my camera, of course - and look what I've got.


No, these aren't a PhotoShop work. My camera did it. Sigh, my 3-year old crappy Nikon broke last year and I had it fixed, and it got busted again during my last trip to Europe earlier this summer. It still does take pictures, but only close-ups; the color and brightness of a picture get weird when I try to shoot without zooming in. I may call these psychedelic images piece of "art", but I can't help but think now is the time to get a new camera.