Slept well. Overnight the room managed to get down to its target temperature of 18 C, but that soon changed as the morning warmed up. Spent the morning chatting online with a friend, then got out and wandered west. Still a nice and green area, somewhat unusual for Japanese urbanism -- narrow streets have their advantages, but don't allow much life beyond potted plants. I found a bikeshare station and rode around for a bit. Not much in the way of bike infrastructure around, and the relatively busy streets were two-lane with just a bit of paint as "sidewalk", but the narrower residential streets had good connectivity and I improvised my way around for a while. But I had a goal of exploring the actual Omiya area, and that was like 30-40 minutes away by bike on a hot day, so I eventually turned in. (Closest 4 bike stations were full, I had to park like 5 minutes out.)
So many community gardens. Or farms? I dunno.
I passed an actual rice paddy on the bike ride.
Not a ton to say about Omiya, I mostly explored east of the station, semi-typical Japanese commercial area. The north-south street east of the station was strikingly free of vehicles; looking at the map, that kind of makes sense, it's sort of a loop off a through street further east. And there's no curbside parking in Japan, so you can't drive in to park, especially if the garages are faced somewhere else... lots of pedestrian alleys too, running east-west.
I had a staneshi? sutaneshi? bowl, some sort of ginger pork over rice. Was good, I didn't finish all the rice. That egg in the photo is raw, to be cracked over the food. I also got some boiled dumplings, which were good. Miso came with the bowl, but it was the blandest miso I've ever had.
A shotengai had this sign, which Google translated as "bikes prohibited", but it looks like it's inviting people to kick over bikes.
Accidentally found the sexy club district too, a bit to the south.
Found a Kura under the station, I thought basement CO2 was good, but despite being open to the basement corridors, was higher inside. Also plates started at 150 yen, not 120 yen like the place two nights before. I had a few plates to try out the place, then left.
West of the station is another one of those large second-story deck areas, like I talked about in Fujisawa and have seen elsewhere. Lots of tall mall-type buildings around there; I walked around a slight bit, then stopped in a park to rest. Some apparent young office workers were there too, at like 7 PM, playing around (like the guys jumping over a tiny 'creek' while the women took photos.)
Some gaming (pachinko?) place had this Certain Scientific Railgun poster outside, where you can have your face replace Kuroko's in a photo. Kind of weird. I've been reading the Railgun manga (and have seen all the Railgun anime seasons before -- not all the Index etc stuff), so that was an amusing coincidence.
Back home, the host had finally brought the fan, after I'd pointed out the weak A/C and my physical discomfort. She didn't acknowledge that failing to keep a cool temperature was weak A/C, just saying there was a big difference in day/night temperatures.
Album
Speaking of noise, plus my recent post about car harms, I watched this City Beautiful video on highway noise. 4% of US population lives within 150 meters of a major highway. 30-45% of big city people live within 500 meters. Los Angeles now requires new apartments near a highway to have air filtration, but that doesn't help using your backyard or balcony.
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