Do you love liquor?

Originally uploaded by gabrielsond.

GourmetCity
I’m pretty sure this grocery store was called something else when I lived there. It was a nice market, although a little more expensive than Super Tamade, and they had a better selection of beer.

View Larger Map

Post Office
Self-explanatory

View Larger Map

Dog Building (わんわん)
I love this building. I don’t actually know what the whole building was used for, I think they had kennel services. The main floor had a large area where dogs could meet and each other and play and where people could watch.

View Larger Map

Entrance To Dotonbori
Dotonbori (Doutonbori/道頓堀) is a pretty famous street in Japan, particularily Osaka. It’s only a couple blocks from where I lived and you could see the neon crab from my balcony at night.

View Larger Map

Photography Shop Gone
Warning: This post will not stand the test of time.
As of August 2008, you would see a construction site on this corner that led from a main street to the street connecting to where I lived. This corner used to have a two story building on it with a little photo/camera shop at street level. The store was old and out dated. Japanese electronics shops are flashy and show all the latest models of cameras, etc. but this store was dusty, dark, and only had some somewhat old pamphlets for digital SLRs.

I needed to get some ID photos taken for something so we decided to try to support a neighbourhood store but the shop owner wanted 3000 yen for 2 photos when I could get them done at a photo booth for no more than 1000 yen. I knew his business was not long for the world in an ever changing Shimanouchi.

View Larger Map

Secret 7-11
I often stopped at this 7-11 on my way to school to pick up ice coffee and curry croquette. This 7-11 is kind of hidden in a shadowy part of the hotel, although they do have signs on the street to direct people.

View Larger Map

Korean Consulate
This was my goal on my first trip to Japan, which lasted less than 8 hours.

View Larger Map

I already made a couple of posts of places in Osaka on Google Maps’ Street View:

• My Japanese Language School (EHLE) On Google Maps
• My Flat In Osaka On Google Maps Street View (Kind Of…)

And there will likely be more because I dig maps and I want to mark places that I remember before I forget.

Here are a few other places near where I used to live:

Super Tamade
We bought almost all of our groceries from this store. I could hop on my bike, go to the store, and be back in under 10 minutes. It was very, very convenient.

View Larger Map

This is the “mansion” that my sister-in-law lived in; very nice building and also very pricey!

View Larger Map

Central Osaka Baptist Church
This is the church that my wife went to and where we taught English together.

View Larger Map

My wife and I translated the menu for this Chinese restaurant from Japanese & Korean to English. The previous English menu was unusable

View Larger Map

The Street View on Google Maps Japan does not go down the street where I lived in Osaka, but you can still see the top of the building from a corner nearby. Since I lived on the top floor (10th) I count this as being visible It the tall brown building in the middle:

View Larger Map

Here are some photos from the flat:

Created with Admarket’s flickrSLiDR.

I just found out that Google Maps Japan has Street View and has a nice selection of streets in Osaka that I remember well. This is the Japanese language school that I attended for a while in 2005.

View Larger Map

I often bought breakfast/lunch from this convenience store. Mmm, prepackaged curry croquette.

View Larger Map

View Larger Map

I was just going through some old photos on flickr that need to be geotagged. I found a few photos from my trip back to my old neighbourhood after not being back for roughly a year and a half. The old parts of the neighbour hood had been completely demolished and there was now a large metal construction fence around a huge area of land where much of the neighbourhood used to be.

This was a shock for me at the time even though I had been living in Seoul for nearly 3 years and I thought I had grown desensitized to the constant reconstruction. However, this had fundamentally changed what I had first recognized as “Korea”. The market was not nearly the same as it used to be and that is where I have some of my earliest memories from. It was kind of like losing a memory

The point that I am getting at is that some places move very quickly. However, some places also move very slowly.

I have been in Saskatoon for nearly three years now. I was born here. I have lived here for longer, but not by much, than I have anywhere else in the world. I will always love it, but I am tired of it. It made me realize that hardly anything has changed here in 3 years let alone the last 15 months like I had experienced in Yeoksam-dong.

Daechi-Dong From Wonderland

Originally uploaded by gabrielsond.

This is the first “panorama” I ever took and I took it without ever realizing what it was. This was the view of Daechi-dong from the 5th floor of the Daechi Wonderland building on September 23rd, 2001, the building where I worked and the place on the 5th floor teachers would go when they wanted to smoke, gossip, flirt, or hangout away from our insane “office”…

I am working on a blog post to try to cover the experiences during my first year of living in Seoul, Korea. I don’t know how long it will take me or how long it will be. Likely, I will get bored of it and end up dividing it into parts and the later parts will never get done. Regardless, I am working on it and I’ll try to continue because I should write some of these things down.

I’m one of the few people weird enough to really dig Tim & Eric Awesome Show, Great Job! They do a lot of really funny and unique bits that would never see anywhere else. Here are some screen grabs from Season 2 Episode 9. As you can guess from the title, the guy’s name is Bread Marrity.