My Kagoshima: Getting Around the Region

Navigating Japan is not for the faint-hearted. Most overseas visitors arrive in Tokyo, only to enter a world of alphabets they cannot read, streets with non-consecutive house numbers, and train stations that are the world’s busiest. In my previous My Kagoshima posts: I emphasized the need to “chunk it.” Kagoshima Prefecture is a manageable chunk…… Continue reading My Kagoshima: Getting Around the Region

Urban Bike: Yard Art in a Civil Society

I see things from my bicycle I don’t see from a bus or car. It might be an old guy on his bicycle, stovepipe hat, bushy beard, archaic black clothes, a character from a Dickens novel. Or a bearded guy cycling the Midtown Greenway in a girlie dress. They seek attention, or inhabit an alternate reality, or…… Continue reading Urban Bike: Yard Art in a Civil Society

Rust

Walked my bicycle through a rusty landscape. Rusty rails, rusty power poles, rusty vegetation.

Urban Bike: Car-Free Minneapolis Bridges

Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge.  Below me sixteen lanes of traffic roar. I’m standing on the Irene Hixon Whitney Bridge, one of many Minneapolis bridges I cannot cross in a car. The bridge takes me between two parks: Minneapolis Sculpture Garden and Loring Park. Loring Park. In Loring Park, the zig-zag approach to this old bridge tells…… Continue reading Urban Bike: Car-Free Minneapolis Bridges