a place called home

This is Osaka. I took this from the floating observatory at the Umeda Sky Building, looking northeast towards Kyoto.
I live over there somewhere.

warning sign: smoking

This just makes me want to take up smoking again just to see what happens.

so it never snows in osaka

Yet here we have the 4th or 5th snowfall in 2 weeks. A really freaky winter apparently. It was all melted within a day of course, but surprising and nice for us homesick northern folk.
It caused a lot of trouble though, as they don't have sand or salt or snowplows of any kind, in addition to the complete lack of insulation or even the concept of central heating. The latter is something you'd think they have down, given the horrific price of electricity here.
(This is a narrow view from the landing of my building.)

warning sign: changing table

One of the many weird and wonderful warning signs. This one was most hysterical when it was first pointed out to me. Now it makes me smile a lot, so I'm not sure if it was the moment and the mood or the sign itself.

popping shower

Ice cream comes in all kinds of different flavours here, appealing to the Asian palate. More

interesting that what's in it, is what it's called. This is one of my faves: Popping Shower flavour. Actual ingredients are as yet unknown (pop rocks perhaps, but it's rarely that logical). I'll update once I figure it out.

The most common flavours of sweets are predictable if you're used to Chinese or Japanese food, but offensive to people like my very British friend Philip (of South African descent), who often complains that desserts should not consist of rice, beans and tea. Put in that way, it does sounds kind of funny, especially since the savoury flavours are the same, plus fish.

And yes, it's true, tomato ice cream is pretty gross.

"yellow dots animal"

Here's an example of things being utterly random. (This is going to be a main theme, there's really no escaping it.) In fact, I only took a picture of this because last week had three or four giraffe synchronicities, and it seemed important to document. Seems as good a place as any to start with.

So last Friday's event du jour was the city-wide photo scavenger hunt, one of many Habitat for Humanity fundraisers happening this month in Osaka. (A bunch of the peeps are going to spend spring break in the Philippines building stuff.) Half-hearted and half-assed and annoyed at some of the lame-ass clues, my group of 4 went at it, but we eventually gave up, spending the next hours in an arcade before catching our respective last trains home.

Earlier in the evening, pumped after scoring my tickets to see the Foos, I met the teammates in one of the main department stores in the centre of it all, which has an entire store dedicated to the metrosexual men that dominate the cities here: Hankyu Men's. Imagine Pocky for Men, but like an entire building. Everything is black and white and gray, even the union jack on floor B1 is stripped of its colours. Ok, in any case, rounding the escalators up to the 7th I passed this display on one of the floors. There's not much more to it. Can't shed any light or offer context. Nothing was being sold here. It's a life-size giraffe, looking around a corner, near some elevators and a tinsel curtain. *sigh*

preface

So here we go, taking this photo-hello idea for a test drive. Special thanks to Tom for the right idea, encouragement and prodding required for me to get on this.

Though I'm usually organized all kinds, time management is something I'm poor at, or rather procrastination is my special skill, (shocking I know). Life in Japan also has a unique ability to suck hours out from under your nose. Keeping in touch shouldn't be the stress-bomb it's become, that's kinda backwards. So this project will hopefully help me to keep track of things, keep in touch with my peeps, and hopefully be generally interesting.

In any case, enough, enough. Let's get going. Ikimassho!