A walk through the city

This blog post is especially at the request of David Bergeson, who wanted to see a little more of the town where I am staying. This afternoon I took a walk around the city and took a bunch of pictures of normal everyday scenes. I walked over by the train station, next to the mall, and finally, along a path by the bay. Enjoy! Captions are below each picture.

This is the street corner near the Yukimoto's house. I don't know if you can see it clearly, but the entrance to the shrine is right next to the building on the left of the picture.

Look! The walking man is wearing a bowler hat!

Does this give you a feel for how narrow the streets are here? Well, now try to imagine two cars, a bicycle, and a pedestrian all passing each other at the same time. It happens frequently, but still makes me nervous.

This is a close up of the roads, with an emphases on the drain cover. All of the drain covers are decorated, and the decorations vary from city to city. I make it a personal quest to collect new pictures from cities I visit, and I will make a post at the end of my trip with my final collection. This is the Kishiwada style drain cover.

This is the street in front of the train station. See that blue building? That's the station.

Here is the station again, from the front.

This is the selection at a vending machine. This one actually has some pretty good stuff: Calpis soda, pineapple calpis, mitsuya cider, water, some sports drink and juu roku cha (an herbal tea). I ended up getting the mitsuya cider - a drink kind of like sprite. Good, but I like the summer orange flavor better. The bottom row is all coffee. They are all about $1.25.

The inside of a covered market street. There are all sorts of tiny shops on both sides, and bicycles are parked everywhere.

This is a close-up of the roof over the market street.

One of the little streets that I love. Key points are the pavement, lanterns, and constant music in the background. This is the street that was playing "Organ Fugue" the other day. Today it was light jazz.

A close up of the lanterns in the streets.

An entrance to a shop. A lot of food stores have these hanging curtains in front of the entrance, usually with the type of food written in Japanese. The people in this store gave me a really weird look while I was taking this picture. Nope, sorry. Not buying today.

This is the roof of a traditional Japanese home. I really like the tiles on the roof.

Another view with some of the trees in front of the house.

This picture shows a typical Japanese apartment building. It looks like it is made of a lot of stripes, but that is the balconies, and the stairways. The stairs are on the outside of the building.

Even though most Japanese houses have no backyard at all, many of them have a tiny garden or a row of potted plants along the wall of their house. I am always amazed at how a garden smaller that 2 feet by 4 feet can be so elegant. This is actually a fairly large row of plants.

This is the entrance to a shrine right next to the mall.

This is just proof that I am in a place with palm trees along the water front.

This is a view of the bridge looking out at the bay. You can also see the wooden pathway that I walked along.

Well, there you go. All of these are fairly normal things that I would see on an average day. The only thing missing from the pictures is the excess of telephone lines and electric lines crossing in front of the buildings. I tried to take pictures without them as much as possible. Hope you enjoyed the everyday sights of Kishiwada!