voluntary thursday — spent yesterday morning doing volunteer work again at the local ward office… as usual, lots of fun…
unguided friday morning tour — rode to the station with Sumie this morning, intending to go for a short-ish ride to hiro-o & back again… got to the intersection in ebisu where i normally turn off for hiro-o & decided maybe i’d go to shibuya instead… so, made it to shibuya, & it’s still pretty early, maybe a little after 8, & the traffic was light, so i thought, i know, shinjuku! so i rode to shinjuku, at which point i completely lost all sense of direction & optimistically took what i thought was an alternate route back to shibuya… nope. rode for a reasonable while without recognising where i was or any of the names on the road signs… was just about to turn around & try to retrace my route when i suddenly found myself thinking, hey, this looks familiar… & yep, it was. it wasn’t shibuya though…
welcome to nakano — swell. not quite exactly the opposite way i should have been going, but you know, close enough. still, that’s cool, i know how to get back to shinjuku from nakano… ha ha ha haaaa, no. as it turned out, i don’t. instead, i discovered how to get from nakano to mejiro, which is about midway between ikebukuro & takadanobaba on the yamanote line… (just as an aside, Sumie & i are supposed to be having dinner in takadanobaba tonight, but i really wasn’t planning on checking it out this morning…) again, not literally but effectively exactly the opposite direction i needed to be going… thank you brain.
& thank you, yamanote line — anyways, once i’d made it back to the relative safety (in navigational terms) of the yamanote line, it was just a matter of following it back to shinjuku (which i managed – that was a reasonably simple left/right decision) & then trying to find my way from shinjuku to shibuya (which, if you’re still awake &/or paying attention, you’ll recall is what got me to nakano in the first place…)
a brief detour through yoyogi park — did better at leaving shinjuku in approximately the right direction on my second attempt, & was doing okay until i kinda zigged instead of zagging at harajuku (it was one of those mornings) & sort of cut through yoyogi park & found myself somewhere i wasn’t really expecting, but then i somehow turned in the right direction & suddenly there i was heading into shibuya again & from there made it home without any further hilarity…
what i learnt today — if you’re going out for a ride, take your map. & yeah, it’s a good idea to check to make sure it’s in your bag, because sometimes (like, last night for instance) you might take it out to look something up at home & forget to put it back… (mind you, looking at the map now, i still cannot figure out how i managed to get from shinjuku to nakano…)
racking up those frequent rider points — so yeah, a bonus three hours on the bike this morning… (had been planning to ride for about an hour & get home around nine, so you know, just after midday was close…)
special delivery — & now i’m spending the afternoon at home, waiting for a package that the post office might be going to deliver between two & five… (also: working on a job application, studying kanji, & thinking about site maintenance…)
