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Posts tagged Parks
Nishi Park
Nov 25th, 2009
Finally, we ended up at Nishi (West) Park. Lying along the Hirosei River, the park is home to lots of events and festivals throughout the year. The leaves were in full colour. We avoided the bum singing all alone in the bushes and rode around the park. Nishi Park serves as a natural western boundry of downtown Sendai; beyond this are bridges and highways leading to universities and suburbs.
Kamisugi 2-Chōme Park
Nov 21st, 2009
Leaving Nishikicho Park, we headed north along Atago-Kamisugi Avenue. Golden yellow trees line the streets in this area, and we eventually ended up at a small (perhaps) unnamed park in the Kamsugi District. We played in the playground, tried to pick persimmon high above us, and harassed some pigeons.
Nishikicho Park
Nov 20th, 2009
Our next stop on was at one of the numerous downtown parks, Nishikicho Koen. There are two large circular halves to the park, one grass and one dirt, which are divided by a row of trees. Lots of events are held here throughout the year, the most popular probably being the Oktoberfest festivals.
Watermark’d
Nov 2nd, 2009
This was more of an exercise in Photoshop batch-processing than anything else, to automate the resizing and inclusion of a watermark in CS4. Selected photos were taken around downtown Sendai over the past week.
Fall Colours
Nov 1st, 2009
Been messing around with my “new” Nikon D40. I’ve got three lenses now, the 18-55mm kit lens that came with the camera, a 55-200mm VR telephoto lens for spying on people, and a 35mm prime lens for ninja photography. Went for a stroll around the Asaichi (Morning Market), Kokubuncho (the red-light/drinking district), and Nishi Koen (West Park) with the telephoto and the prime.
A Trip to Yagiyama Zoo
May 25th, 2009
We’ve been meaning to make it up to the zoo since last year, even before we moved to Sendai. It’s pretty good considering its small size, with a variety of birds, reptiles, and animals from all around the world. The primates were particularly interesting; we got to feed some of them, and witnessed a couple fights. Across the street from the zoo is Sendai’s amusement park, Bennyland. Looks more geared for young children, but I’m sure we’ll make the trip there sometime this summer anyways.
Got to play around a little with my trusty little Casio EX-V8 at the zoo too. Along with taking great quality stereo video, you can get a true 14x optical zoom when shooting at 2M. Most of the photos below were taken at the telephoto end of the lens. As you can see the zoom and image stabilization work pretty good for such a small and inexpensive camera. It’s really a shame for consumers that Casio discontinued this line after only 2 models. I got mine though so I guess that’s all that matters!
New Neighbourhood
Mar 7th, 2009
Got the call from Sendai today, our apartment application has been approved! Let’s take a look at a couple places that are in our new neighbourhood.
Just a short walk (or a 2 minute train ride) away stands the home of the Tohoku Rakuten Golden Eagles, aka the Rakuten Eagles. Pro baseball teams in Japan are sponsored by companies. Rakuten is an Internet shopping company. Think Amazon, but with travel as well. The Eagles are the newest team in Japanese baseball, playing their first season back in 2005. I’ve watched a little bit of baseball since I moved to Japan but never had any rooting interest in a particular team, so I suppose I will adopt these guys as “my” team.
The softest stadium in Japan!
And where do the Rakuten Eagles play? At the mighty KLEENEX STADIUM!!! Yeah, that Kleenex. It isn’t very large, which is nice, so the atmosphere will definitely be more intimate than the Kingdome or BC Place ever were. I checked out the stadium back in November during an open practice. The sightlines look pretty good from any seat. Tickets are priced well; the cheap seats being only 1200 yen (about $16CDN).
Open practice at Kleenex Stadium.
Next to the baseball stadium is Miyaginohara Athletic Park. The day of the open practice there was also a race through Sendai, so I stopped by and snapped a few photos.
Just a block away from us is Tsutsujigaoka Park, one of Sendai’s largest parks (maybe?). It’s one of the most popular places to do “Hanami“, Cherry Blossom viewing. In the spring everybody goes to various parks to hang out with friends and family, eating and drinking till all hours of the night. Here’s an old video of some hanami from Akita City.
Tsutsujigaoka Park - 榴ヶ岡公園
At the little amphitheater tucked away in a corner of the park there was a DJ spinning some techno, pretty cool… There’s also a supermarket a minute away, a YaMaYa, and a bunch of restaurants, a Starbucks, and a 7-11. From all I’ve heard and seen this is a pretty nice neighbourhood to live in. It’s gonna be good to live in a real city again!
2008 Travels: Yamagata City
Jan 12th, 2009
Browsing through the thousands of photos I still haven’t gotten around to organizing, I stumbled upon a series of slideshows that I created but never published. Here’s one of them.
Yamagata City, the capital of, you guessed it, Yamagata Prefecture, was the second stop on our tour of the prefecture back in November. It was a stopover more than anything; we came, we ate dinner, watched breakdance fighting, we slept. The park was nice too.