Blizzardboy | A Kiwi in Japan

I took this photo a while back up in Ibaraki. I wonder what sort of problems they had that led them to put up a sign over the toilet saying “Push do not thrust!???

And to think I used to fence for a club that had “In thrust we trust!” for a motto.

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Here are some photos I took whilst out walking one night at the end of last year. The photos were taken around Azabujuban and Roppongi.

Here is a slideshow (pictures change automatically, or you can click to make it hurry up):

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And here is a gallery:

Actually I put these up to test a new gallery plugin for wordpress. Seems to be working fine:)

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Went shopping this afternoon, to the Yamaya supermarket in Aoyama-1chome, and was quite bemused to come across this sign in their wine corner. The flag on the top is the Australian flag, then it says New Zealand under the flag, and written vertically in Japanese is… Australia!

Not sure how they ended up with that sign, but surely New Zealand needs a new flag… and Australia could probably do with a new one as well!

By the by, we couldn’t find any penne pasta, and other shops seem to be out of it as well. Prices for other types of pasta are up as well. Global warning leads to anti-penne pandemic anyone?

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Out for a walk earlier this evening and I saw this scene in Azabu-Juban. It is a nice place to walk around in the evening with an interesting mix of people – both Japanese and foreign. The photo was taken with my mobile phone, so it isn’t as sharp as it would be with a normal digital camera, but I like the way it balances with a Japanese element on the left, and with the moon taking center stage. There is a delivery vehicle in the foreground. I have always found taking pictures of the moon to be quite a difficult thing to do, so I feel very lucky with this shot.

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東京に引っ越しました！やや東京だ。懐かしいこといっぱい思い出します。

これは屋上から見る景色です。都会だね！いばらぎ県から引っ越すと百姓という気持ちになるぺ。昔はそういう気持ちはなかった。

二つ目の写真も俺が住んでいるビルの屋上から撮った写真です。すごいね！Mainlandとはニュージーランドの南島の事です。なんで港区にあるかどうか分からんけどいい事だぜ！

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Doing some gardening yesterday, and I was as surprised as ever at the diversity of life in amongst our collection of local flora. Upstairs for thinking found a similar spider I guess on his balcony – these are apparently found through Asia, and are very common in Japan, growing to quite respectable sizes.

We also have some great grasshoppers, lots of dragonflies and cicadas as well as a number of skinks living down the back of the house. No snakes yet though.

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Uncovered meat truck transporting raw offal to Tokyo on the Joban expressway from Ibaraki. Family restaurant meat stew anyone?

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And I thought Japan and China had the monopoly on strange signs! This is a sign from Kyrgystan, courtesy of the Tolkunistan blog. Instead of being in Cyrillic, the sign is romanized. It means electric panel in case you were wondering – and is not some critical comment on British techno!

You can check out the post here: Problems with Uzbek latin alphabet

We didn’t see signs like that when we were in Kyrgyzstan, but we thought going to eat at pectopahs was strange enough!

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I never thought sewers could be a thing of beauty, unless perhaps under the pen of Umberto Eco, but there photos are absolutely spectacular. I found them in this blog post. And you can see a complete collection at this Japanese website (note it is flash and correspondingly slow). The photos are from the sewage system in the Edogawa Ward of Tokyo.

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Up the road from our house a couple of kilometers. I took this photo yesterday whilst out for a bike ride. Still rainy season here, although it isn’t the monsoon rainy season I had imagined from reading George Orwell as a university student. It is more like steady drizzle which reminds me of Christchurch weather. There certainly are a lot of open spaces near where we live. And a wide range of architectural styles. This house looks like it wouldn’t be too out of place on the West Coast. The hills in the background are part of the Tsukuba Range (don’t know that hills name) – it has been heavily cut into by an open cast mine but you can’t see that too clearly in the photo. A very nice area to ride ones bike around.

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