Bicycles are a much more sensible form of transport over here, certainly in the city anyway. They ride on the pavements which makes it much safer for the cyclists… there are plenty of parking areas for bikes, this is the one by Harajuku station. Out in the suburbs there are multistory bikeparks, which look like scaled down versions of their automotive brothers. While a lot of these bikes have a lock on them they are rarely locked to anything – this piece of pavement is swept clean of leaves every morning, any unmovable bikes would cause considerable problems for the sweepers.
Of course, there are some other beautiful skylines around too… these are quite common over here, but the question is, do I get something like this? It’d be a pain to find somewhere to put it and I’m fairly sure I don’t understand that many road signs, but it’d be kinda groovy to pick up something with better performance than the old Laguna, especially if I can get around some of the import duty having lived over here. And how cool would it be to have brought over your own grey market import? So, the question is what to get…?
I’m still not convinced all these nets are golf, theres probably some other games played in them too – there can’t be that many golfers here, surely?
Back on the trainspotting theme – a wonderful view over my nearest big station, looking the other way from this bridge you see only tracks. Not seen any anoraks hanging around with their weak lemony drink here yet. There was a little trainspotting place just by the track for the mountain railway at the weekend, just large enough for one person to get a good photo of the quaint passing train.
If people spotting is more your bag then the other side of the station is where you’ll want to be. There are often bands playing here, the guys being filmed while I was on the way home on Sunday were in this plaza, with the 777 signs being changed for something else behind them. Behind that there is a little maze of busy twisty streets full of little cafes and bars, with the occasional music instrument shop and seedy DVD shop.
My local department store – 14 storeys of consumer goodness, including Tokyu Hands (a crafts/DIY store), HMV, DigitalSquare and acres of womens clothes. The top two floors of most of these store/mall buildings often seem to be full of little resturants, then some toys and/or techie stuff, then a floor of mens clothes, three or four floors of womens clothes, a couple of floors (1F/2F) with a number of little boutiques, then meat store downstairs, and fruit down again.
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