
This is a picture of part of the street I live on. It’s mainly out of view, but the house on the far left is the one I call home (you know I’m turning Japanese because I’m slightly embarrassed that you can see laundry hanging from the second floor veranda). Just to the right, a bit difficult to see, is a tiny alley that leads onto a slighly bigger pathway behind our house. I love these tiny passageways, reminds me of living in a maze. It’s difficult to capture the essence of the lane because of the lighting, but I’ll try for future posts.
The gravel expanse in the foreground is a large parking lot. We’re actually flanked by this parking lot to the front of the house, as well as a parking lot to the right (not in view). These lots are eyesores, but a necessity one lives with (I would say that half the houses on our street don’t have a garage or carport, including our’s). The two houses to the right of our’s are old and what I would call dilapidated, though not unpleasantly so. Both of them have san-gawara (glazed ceramic tiles) roofs (our’s doesn’t, sigh), and add a nice charm to the street. Unfortunately both have been modified over time. Witness the house in the middle with the balcony that looks like it was just plopped down somewhere it would fit. And both homes have fronting brick walls flush up against the outer wall of the house (for security I suppose), added without any apparent thought to how they might integrate with the main structure.
A closer view of the house on the right is available here.