This is a view of the ‘docklands’ area over the other side of the station from the hotel. The buildings on each side of this picture are joined together with skyways running down each side at three or four storeys up. There are bridges across the chasm at various intervals. They’re all office buildings, but each has a number of cafes in its overelaborate entrance hall, and theres a few shops there too but nothing particularly exciting – they’re obviously aimed at the office workers above.
This is a more typical street scene (albeit quite a quiet street as shopping areas go), you can see the signs for shops on the sides of the buildings, there are generally open stairwells to climb to get to the higher shops, but sometimes (in busier, and therefore taller) places there’ll be lifts. There was one place I went were there wasn’t any hallway between the lift and the shop, you just got out the lift and were directly confronted with a wall of CDs to buy.
There are taxis waiting for customers from the station off to the right – I’ve not done a lot of travelling by taxi (I hate the idea of paying someone else to drive when I enjoy it so much) – they’re mainly Toyota Crowns which have been fitted with automatic back doors, which is a little bit freaky. There seems to be a number of taxi firms, each with their own colours, and doubtless a few indies too.
Just beyond the taxis you make out some cycle racks, but I’ll say more about those later.
Looking back down the chasm toward the station. This is such an artificial environment, just like our docklands.
There seems to be a lot of these scooter things around, they have twin rear wheels an pivot underneath the seat so the front wheel and seat tilt while the two rear wheels stay level. A number of them have those over-the-head fairings/roof things. This one was interesting because its got a shock absorber for its load, which means that the pizza doesn’t get stuck to the box just ‘cos the rider was over anxious about cornering…theres a remarkably large number of these contraptions around.
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