Weekends are the time to be adventurous, or, if you are currently under the weather like yours truly, dream about being adventurous. Being an armchair traveler does wonders for letting me forget the aching joints, high temperature, and the tightness in my lungs. In this morning’s armchair travelling, I stumbled across the lady who wears her wedding dress while travelling around the world and the guy who photographs his girlfriend leading him across their many escapades.

Twosocks and I, as perennial budget travelers, only take photos home as souvenirs from our trips, so these are brilliant inspirations for how we can make the pictures more memorable and show more of our personalities. Jump-shots and playing with perspectives are always fun to do, but they are also rather ubiquitous and I quite like the challenge of trying to find new ways to play with making memories from a trip.

One of our more playful attempts of taking pictures during our recent trip to Japan is to twirl around the places we love. I wore mostly summer dresses during the trip, since they take so little space in our backpacks and Japan’s summers are notoriously humid. I grew up with the Sound of Music, so the image of Liesl’s dress twirling prettily during her “Sixteen Going on Seventeen” dancing duet with Rolf in the green house is firmly imprinted in my brain. I cannot move as gracefully as she did, but at least I can twirl.

I rarely travel overseas during summer, so every time I see the photos of my twirling dresses I remember the sun warming my cheeks, the light breeze on my shoulders, and the beads of perspiration on my forehead along with the most prominent memory of each new place. As a bonus – I got to live my childhood fantasy!

At one of the alleys of geisha houses in Gion, Kyoto, where we eavesdropped on maikos plucking the delicate strings of the shamisen.

At Shirakawa-Go, a traditional village deep in a valley on our way to the Japan alps.

At one of the temples in Nara, while one of its free-ranging deers was watching me.

At Arashiyama’s river bank in Kyoto, where Twosocks and I could not find even one cigarette butt among the pebbles.

Have a nice weekend, armchair travelers and adventurers on the road!

Jakarta, 16 November 2013
Gypsytoes