Sunny Saturday

 This morning I decided to go for a ride out to Youme Town mall.  I planned to take some pictures to share with everyone here.  But, when I go there they weren't open.  I always forget that nothing really opens before 10 am.

In any case, on my way out I opened the door and a huntsman spider fell right in front of me.  Had I been half a step further out the door it would have landed on me.  These are not dangerous to people, but they are worryingly large.  This one had a body that was about 1.5" long and its legs made it about 4" across.  If you're trying to come up with a scale so you know what I mean, lay your left hand on the table, palm up.  The spider with legs out was as big as my palm.  The body of the spider would have filled that little divot in my palm.  The thing was a little startled and tried running into the apartment.  I cut it off and worked for about a minute to shoo it outside.  I apologize and/or accept your gratitude for not having the wherewithal to take a picture to share.

I rode back to Youme Town once they were open.  First, the direct route from the apartment to this mall is 5.5 km (3.4 miles).  If I had only taken the most direct routes, I rode about 13.6 miles in my 4 legs of the journey.  In fact, I ended up taking a more meandering route, so it's probably reasonable to say I did 15 miles on the bike today.  Second, I like riding in the morning because there is much less wind.  My second trip out there was with the wind blowing in my face almost the whole time.  And this isn't some comfortable breeze.  This is a "flags snapping" sort of wind.  In this light, me feeling tired when I returned this afternoon makes sense.

I'm not terribly comfortable taking pictures with people in the background.  It feels rude, somehow.  Especially if I don't know them.  As such, I only took three pictures.  Here is the outside.

The parking lot is staffed by men directing traffic.  This seems standard for malls as Fuji Grand also has them.   In this picture, the right side of the building is a three or four story parking garage.  The open lot probably has room for about 100-150 vehicles.

This is from inside the mall.  I'm on the second floor.  I don't know how well the people show up, but there are many of them.  Everyone is masked, with very few doing the thing with their nose sticking out.  Some of the stores have modified their entrances such that patrons line up, have a temperature check, get hand sanitizer, then are allowed in.  Others sort of spill into the hallways.  It's rather chaotic, and when I wander around I'm not really certain if I've walked "into" a store sometimes or not.  I've tasked myself with committing 20-30 phrases to memory for next weekend.  I feel kind of out of place, and if I'd pushed myself to do this earlier I would be more comfortable.

When you look at the layout of the mall you can see why it's a bit chaotic.  Whereas most malls I've been to in the US have a main hall with branches running off the sides, this is organized like one of the neighborhoods here.  You have the main road, but the side roads have alleys between buildings.  I took this picture without really thinking about it.  Now I have a better sense of why I've been struggling to remember which way is up.  Maybe this will modify my thinking somewhat.

If I have my bearings correct, the large yellow block on the right of Floor 1 is the grocery store.  That space is about the size of the grocery section at a typical Meijer or Walmart if you've been in one of those.  If you zoom in there you'll see this.

I'm pretty sure the vertical yellow bar with レジ (reji) are the cash registers.  After going through that I've realized this picture may be the most valuable one I've taken here.  It lets me see where the shops are, and I can try to suss out the names of some of them.  There is one called "Alphabet's Alphabet."

On my way back I rode through more agricultural area.  It's still odd to be rolling along with nearly continuous lines of cars in both directions moving 35-40 mph surrounded by convenience stores, car lots, shopping malls, restaurants, 6 lane wide intersections only to turn on a side street and travel for 5 minutes on a bike and end up here.

I took this video as I was straddling the bike.  At the end of it I had to change to rotating just my hand instead of my torso, so I apologize for that.  If you've got the sound on, you can hear the wind blowing as well.  Wind noise is always louder in a video like this than in real life.  I knew the wind was blowing, but didn't really hear it.  Still, I could not hear the cars on the highway that I wasn't more than a 5 minute ride away from.

I know I post a lot about the urban/rural changes.  That's the thing that strikes me as most foreign.  I expected the language, the food, the customs, the traffic, a whole host of things, to be different.  This was the unexpected experience.