recovery

recovery

A street aside presents different views.

mementos

mementos

Buying into the tourism, I picked up some cute local trinkets in a store along the way. There's too much good stuff to be able to resist. Plus, it's nice to have something that, years later, with a glance, will transport you back to that place and time.

incantations

incantations

Bottles of, as we say in English, sake 酒, but more specifically nihonshu 日本酒 (“Japanese wine”), standing attractively outside another store.

I kept intending to try it somewhere, but never did. There's always next time.

cultural snacking

cultural snacking

The old streets in Takayama city 高山市 are beautiful and fun, but like most tourist spots in Japan, they've been highly optimised for the extraction of tourist dollars.

They are perhaps a bit too perfect, too high a distillation of experience. Not necessarily inauthentic, but akin to cultural fast food. Everyone enjoys a bit of fast food occasionally, but it shouldn't be all that you eat!

cubics

cubics

A small, but far from the smallest, parking zone. It's not unusual in Japan to see just a couple of car parking spaces with their own electronic paid parking terminal.

And more often than not the spaces will be occupied by compact, cube-like vehicles, narrower than any model you could buy in Australia. Cute and super practical.