Photo Tuesday: Leaving Tokyo

I wrote a whole slew of posts detailing the things that I saw (and ate) during the five weeks I spent in and around Tokyo last year.  I’ve posted dozens of photographs from that trip on this blog, but I don’t think I ever got around to posting this one.

This is one of my favorite photographs from my time in Japan.  It was taken from the high speed train ride back to the airport.  I took dozens of pictures out of the train window, but at this particular moment, we were passing through a busy street near Tokyo Katsushika.   There is so much happening in this photograph, from bike riders patiently waiting for the train to pass so that they can cross the street, to the people going in and out of shops down the street.  Plus:  a Kirin vending machine!

Every time I look at this photograph, I see some new detail that I hadn’t noticed previously.  What do you see when you look?

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Chapter Two.

It’s been a little more than two months since my last post.  I said that I wasn’t sure if I would come back, and that I had no plans to restart the blog.  I’ve come to realize that was short-sighted.

I’ve missed writing, even though sometimes it feels like a chore and I don’t always have stuff to talk about.   The thing is, when I do have stuff to talk about, I’m excited to write here.  I missed you guys.    And I do have stuff to talk about, even if it’s not as travel-filled as it used to be.

Just yesterday, I had a thing that made me want to blog.  I went to the eye doctor for the first time in about four years.  The last time I had my eyes examined was just before I moved to Germany in late 2011.   Since that time, everything in that office has changed.  The plaza was ripped up and new stores were built.  The eye doctor’s place of business moved to a new office a few doors down, with a completely rebuilt floor plan.   They added more doctors and added a bunch of recent optometry technology.   My favorite piece of new tech is this digital camera that takes wide photographs of the inside of your eyes.  This isn’t new technology, but it’s new to me, and it’s utterly fascinating.   This is my left eye, as of Wednesday afternoon.

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The photograph shows the inside of my eye.  You can see the optic cup, as well as the blood vessels running through my eye.  The black slashes at the bottom edge are actually my eye-lashes.  The whole thing looks a great deal like some sort of fantastic nebula, and I halfway expect Voyager to come swooshing by at any moment.

Pretty nifty, eh?

So:  I’m back.  I can’t sustain the frequency of posts that I used to run, but I’ll definitely write here whenever I want to share a neat photograph or talk about something that’s on my mind.   Onward!

So, how have you all been?