Flying Aubergine

We went on a short trip to Amman in the beginning of autumn. In fact we only had one day to discover the whole city centre, so we had to do it fast. We started the day visiting some of the shops and a local market. I love walking around in markets, especially food markets with all the nice smells and the colours. I am a huge fan of way they sell spices in Amman, in open bags like on the picture below. It smells good and it looks lovely too. There were plenty of shops selling colourful dresses with traditional patterns. Would've loved to try on one of those...  Next stop was the Roman Theater. This theater is said to be from the 2nd century and is actually still being used for cultural activities, though nothing was on while we were there.  During our time downtown, we also passed by a few umbrella streets. This one was my favourite...                                                         Our last stop was at the Amman Citadel l

I recently stayed overnight in a temple during a trip to Japan. It was located in a temple village on Mount Koya, or Koyasan in Japanese, south of Osaka. Probably no need to mention the majority of the overnight places in this village were temples, and therefore the amount of tourists was also quite high. To get to the top of Mount Koya, we took a 5 minute cable car ride from the train station where the train dropped us off. The train ride from Osaka was really scenic, passing plenty of small villages on our way to the cable car. When we arrived to the top we had to get on a 10 minute bus ride to get to the village. We weren't allowed to walk from there as the road was quite narrow and not safe for pedestrians. Arriving at the temple the first thing we had to do before entering was to take of our shoes as they're not allowed inside. The receptionist, who of course was a monk, greeted us in fluent English in a tiny room full of paperwork, books and documents in a charming