Nara: Sleepy Pre-Post

Yanavy and company (plus me) went to Nara today. I took a lot of pictures, but I haven't really looked through them yet. A couple of them that needed some Photoshopping, though, I did just now.
These picture are from a game center (usually "arcade" in American English") we found completely by accident on the way back to the station. Cool thing: four-player air hockey! I teamed up with Angela against Sara, Cassie, and Yanavy, the latter two of whom took turns.

We also found a super-super cheap place to get takoyaki and I found some really tasty mochi to boot.

Anyway, inside the game center were these banners, which I felt pretty much required to take pictures of. Tails is my favorite character of them, and pretty much always has been. I just noticed that Sonic and Knuckles both have a species name, whereas Amy and Tails both just have their full names.

The quality of the pictures is kind of bleh, at best, but I did what I could for them. Eh.


Here's one last picture so you can see what they look like coming out of my camera:

Flower Park/Not-Park

I went up to Northern Kyoto yesterday and was somewhat surprised to find out that it's less than half an hour away by bike. I visited the park I talked about in the day before yesterday's post, but it turns out it's not so much a park as... A 50'x30' dirt field with flowering plants on three sides and a bench on the fourth. There's a also a large fenced off building. I'dve gone in, but it was locked, so presumably I'm not supposed to go in.

[Left: A rock.
Right: A leaf.]

I imagine this place is beautiful in the spring and summer. It should look fairly pretty once fall comes, as well. Many of the trees and plants have wooden labels attached to them, written in kanji with yomigana (how to read the kanji).


It's nearly fall, of course, but there were still some flowers in bloom, like you can see on both sides of this paragraph. There was also a shrine of some kind, but I'm not sure what it was dedicated to. There were flowers and maybe a glass of water, which leads me to believe it's similar to the shrines that you find all over town. I think there are are a few hundred scattered around Kyoto. I'm not certain why I didn't take a picture of it... It has some nice carving done on it, so maybe I'll grab a shot later and at it here.

They have an interesting choice of lights that I don't really understand the reason for. I mean, it appears to be a normal socket that's completely exposed to the elements and simply protected from physical shock by the cage around it. Seems as though you would go through a lot of bulbs or power due to shortages and random water, but I have to assume they don't. Either way, it looks pretty cool.

They seem to really not want you to bring bikes in, as there's this freaky fence thing at the entrance, and a sign saying not to bring bikes into the park. It also warns against playing ball games, especially baseball, in the park. Please see the picture at right for further details.

These last two were just me playing around with my camera and flash. I couldn't tell whether the bug-thing (left) was alive or if it was just the molted skin, but I didn't know what it was, so I stayed a few feet away.
You can see a little of the shrine in the background as that out-of-focus speckled gray splotch.

And, yay, flash.

Bridge: Vital Importance

Since I couldn’t do judo today, and that’s all I had planned, I wandered around and took pictures for a while.

On the way back to the school is a bridge, and I took some pictures off of it. Nothing really exciting, as I was trying to be artistic with them, and that just never works out well. But this canal is pretty cool anyway, so pictures.

Oh, and the bird. I love the coloring on its feathers. It’s like a grayscale rainbow, but with wings and a beak.

As I was about to leave, I noticed there was a little rust on the bridge, and took these two shots. As you can see, the bridge is a little rusty.

Though it would require being on the bridge to try, I was tempted to set up harmonic motion in the bridge. But I don’t want to be the one standing there stomping my feet in the middle when the bridge explodes, collapses, wobbles its way into the street, or falls through time.

Kind of random, but the guy who runs the judo club was talking about a “timeslip” when he was describing a technique to me. I lost the rest of the explanation because I was too busy trying to fathom how that works. Apparently, the Japanese have advanced judo considerably faster than us silly Americans, ‘cause I totally don’t remember ever breaking physics when I did judo before…

So, the bridge. You know how Sonic the Hedgehog games always had spikes in the most random places, and you’d think “What the hell? Why are there spikes there?” Well, apparently this is one of those cases where the creators were just going what was natural, I guess. Anyway, there were those, and then some rusty spikes. You can see the rusty ones are bent at odd angles and look kind of evil.

It must vitally important that nobody goes on that ten-foot stretch of walkway?