Japan Series - Street scenes

Bundles of overhead wires at Kyoto

Traditional barber sign at a Kyoto side street

Hand warmers on a motor bike.  Bigger sizes were seen on bicycles.

Collection of bikes at Okayama

Two tier bike storage racks at Kurashiki

Night time illuminations at Osaka

Osaka at night

Neon signs of personal services at Osaka

A youth band drawing in large crowds at a shopping lane, Okayama

A small chunk of the highway network at Osaka, taken from the Chuo Line

The Ferris Wheel at Tempozan Harbour Village, Osaka.

The wheel has coloured lights that provide weather forecast

A roadside shrine at Kurashiki

Seafood on sale at Matsue

Well behaved children on a day out one Saturday morning at Matsue

The Shinkansen terminal at Kyoto, spotlessly clean and super efficient

Advertisements on a train - every available inch

on local trains and subways is sold to advertising

Boats on Asahi River, Okayama

Night sweeper

Two snow ploughs were found clearing the snow in the neighbourhood at 04:00 hours today.

Neighbourhood snow clearing is unheard of in the UK.  But in Kansas the city ordinance requires the owner, occupant or agent of a property adjoining a public sidewalk to remove snow and ice within 12 hours after it has fallen.  And if it falls during the night, the snow and ice must be removed no later than six hours after sunrise.  This will simply not fly in the UK. 

During a very brisk walk on campus today, necessitated by a meeting in another building, it was cool (sic) to see three characters frolicking in the snow.  Such fun.  This picture was taken on my Sony Ericsson K770i phone.

Weather forecast predict temperatures dropping below 0 degree F tomorrow....

True Grit

I am back at Kansas. 

When the small aircraft landed at Kansas City International Airport on 5th January and the tyres crunched the compacted ice patches on the standing to stereophonic effects, the reports of four-foot-deep snow drifts suddenly became very real.

On arrival at the hotel, the winter wonderland scene that greeted me looked pleasing to the eye, but felt treacherous on the feet.  More fresh snow has since fallen, and the snow ploughs simply cannot keep up with the pace of the precipitations.

The UK apparently is also in the grip of the white stuff.  Here's the granite bridge over the garden stream having been cleared for passage. 

Co-workers who have acres of land in the Kansas countryside are equipped with snow blowers and snow ploughs.  The car rental manager has a snow plough because his house at Liberty, Missouri has a 100-ft long drive way so a snow blower would be as useful as an ashtray on a motorbike.  He demonstrated the traction control on the Toyota Avalon that is on hire to me in the car park, which by late afternoon, had metamorphized into an ice rink.  A further tip from him was to be ready to smile nicely to the hotel guys to entice them to come out to clear the hard ice lodged between the car and the tyres.  Life has its funnier moments.

On the journey out, Heathrow implemented new "enhanced security" measures for USA bound passengers, in response to the botched bombing by a Nigerian on the flight from Amsterdam to Detroit on Christmas Day.  This means all 247 passengers on the Boeing 777 had to be individually body searched at the departure gate, and every item in the hand luggage had to be examined.  The laptop had to be opened in case it had been tampered with since the security screening on entering air-side.  The flight was therefore 1.75 hours late leaving Heathrow.  Here's a thought: do more security measures equal smarter security? 

Surprisingly the domestic terminal at Chicago O'Hare has not put in place any "enhanced security measures" even though transit passengers enter it from the land-side after exiting the international terminal.  However, there is now a new rule:  shoes can no longer be put in the trays; they have to sit on the conveyor belt to go through security screening.  Sometimes it is hard work keeping up with petty rules that mutate and multiply like cancerous cells. 

As I stepped off the plane to set foot again on Kansas soil, on a cold and wet Tuesday evening, I miss home already.