Late summer park visit

Yesterday I finally took that time-out that I'd been promising myself (back here) and rode to my favourite park again. It was a hot day, but not unbearable. I should have worn sunscreen, however, as my arms ended up a bit pink.

I couldn't believe this scene, nor the photo I took of it. Look like Tokyo to you? This park (Koganei) is one of the largest green spaces in the Tokyo area, the surrounding population density is around 9,000 to 10,000 people per square kilometre. Very few of them were at the park yesterday despite the beautiful weather.

I had fun playing with my camera. Here I tried to take a photo through a fence of this traditional Japanese thatched roof at the Edo-Tokyo Open Air Architectural Museum (this is where we did our first field trip in the photography course I did back in June). The website says this is an "Elevated Granary from Amami-Oshima Island".

This is another photo I took back in June at the museum which is located inside Koganei park.

I rode through much of the park yesterday, ended up with a total ride of 16km. The light was brilliant. We don't often get blue-sky days here in the "big smoke". Not that it is as polluted as many large cities, but often there's cloud or a bit of haze. Just making the effort to get out of the house and do something as pleasurable as this was truly worth it.

But the reality of a park at this end of summer in Japan is that it's generally looking ragged. In fact my legs were often getting brushed by long grass, especially when I rode on the small paths on the way to the park. A hot, wet summer and who has enough time to keep charge of the grass and weeds?

These guys have time to garden. I'm guessing this is a kind of "friends of the park" association doing gardening in the park. It looked like they were working on tidying up flower beds.

And my two benches. This scene is going to change significantly over the next few months.