At last, matched again!

Towards the end of last summer we took a trip far to the north east (or East-north as we like to call it in Japanese) to visit Matsushima in Miyagi prefecture.

Matsushima is an excellent destination for touristing. They have been perfecting their skills of welcoming, entertaining, and parting you with your money for at least 400 years.

The view from the shore out over the archipelago is one of Japan's Seven Views and has been the subject of haikus since the Middle Ages.

Anyway, tourists are drawn to temples and Matsushima has them in ample supply. In one of these, the burial place of at least some members of the powerful Date family, we pounced on the opportunity to make matching bracelets.
We used turquoise, yellow, red, and white to make sort of a combination of the Swedish and Japanese flags. We also included a black stone (a plastic stone, like the rest) because we're cool.
Oh, they were wonderful bracelets. Colourful and, due to the principles of construction, imbued with potent superstition.

Alas, are matching wrists were not meant to be. Before long Y'e bracelet was lost to her. A stupid oaf was at fault. A pox upon the oaf!
So, for many months I was alone in having a cheerful wrist. But today! Today we went to closest north-eastern destination available, Ueno in Tokyo, and among the many trinkets and knickknacks in the shopping strip called American Side Street, Y spied cheap bracelets of turquoise (coloured?) stone that she immediately knew were perfect raw material for new matching bracelets.

To make bracelets like these you need a longish, thin, strong, elastic cord, and some spherules with holes through them.
We bought plenty of the latter, but for the former we had only the cords from the bracelets we slaughtered. This still work out fine for Y who has appropriately slender wrists (although I managed to cause all the stones to slip of the cord a couple of times), less fine for me.
It took until the sixth or seventh try before I managed to close the bracelet using only my hands, my feet, a pair of pliers, a pincette, super glue, and Y's hands. Kind of makes me wish my home was equipped with some kind of vice. Or that we had bought cords of proper length.
I ruined Y's half-dried nail polish in the process too.

Anyway, now we have, at last, matching bracelets again. The Sweden-Japan theme is not very obvious anymore, but in its stead we a little bit of well earned plastic bling. I hope it visible in the photo.

Apart from stones Ueno offered the National Science Museum and a dingy eatery called Torahachi. Both of them terrific places that calls for another visit. At the latest I want to go to the science museum because then they'll have two new short films screening in the spherical movie theater. I can hardly wait.