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Sortedams Sø (Black Pond Lake) at night can give you a hint as to how the lake got its name. During the day, there is nothing black about it.
Details on this photo: Nikon D7000 with Tamron 17-50mm f/2.8 XR Di-II LD Aspherical Autofocus Lens, 13 seconds, ISO 200, 17mm, F/5.
I never tire of scenes like these from the streets of Copenhagen. The buildings, the bikes, it’s all good.
This is my favorite kind of sky–a mixture of bright blue and crazy cloud action. Akihabara in Tokyo was the place.
Another angle out of the Sumitomo Building in Shinjuku appeared as my desktop wallpaper today. The building to the left is now the more common place for tourists to view Tokyo, the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Office Building.
The national pastime in Japan is not baseball or sumo; it is bathing. These days, most people have a really nice ofuro (お風呂) room in their apartment for such activities. Back in the day, few people could afford such a luxury so they went to the sento (銭湯 or public bath or bath-house) on a regular basis. Sadly, most of these are now gone.
You can still spot the remaining sento from a distance, though, because of the smoke stack (visible in the above picture). Notice that no steam is coming out of this one. That’s because it is no longer used as a sento. Instead, Scai the Bathhouse, the name written in English on the wall in the above photo, has been converted into an art gallery. You can find it in the Yanaka part of Tokyo.
The wires hanging above the streets in Japan drove me crazy for a while. Then I got used to them and hardly took notice. Returning to the USA caused me to notice the lack of wires. It’s strange how the mind works–focusing on differences rather than the “normal.”
On a bike ride around the Yanaka area of Tokyo I spotted this old style building. Yanaka was spared the fire bombings of WW2 so you do sometimes see buildings more than 60 years old, a rarity in Tokyo. I didn’t know if this was built before the war or just made to look old. Given the concrete base I figured the latter.
However, thanks to the sign on the front (吉田屋酒店) and with a little internet research, it turns out that this Yoshida Liquor Store was built in Yanaka in Meiji Jidai, Year 43 (1910). In the 1980s it was moved to its present location. You can check it out in person at this address: 〒110-0002 東京都 台東区 上野桜木2-10-6.