Just got home....

I was on a Yamagata Shinkansen train this morning heading back after a couple of nights spent in Tokyo.  As I gathered my bags (yes, I had bought a fair amount of stuff) I decided I'd take a taxi home.  The thought occurred to me then that I've seemingly always gotten a driver who knows where to go when I request to be driven to my apartment building.  Thinking of the sheer number of places one could go, even in this small city, I realized it's quite surprising that so many drivers would know the building.  This morning when I got in a cab it wasn't any different.  I gave the neighbourhood name and the building name.  The driver confirmed she had heard.  Before we pulled out from the station though she turned and asked to confirm where exactly it was I wanted to go.  "There's so many apartment buildings", she remarked afterwards.  The ironic quality of the moment had me laughing quietly to myself....

Exit Through the Entrance and Vice Versa

This is a copy of a post I put up in a forum I frequent:

The local AEON shopping centre has a number of ground level parking lots.  I prefer to park in the one closest to the building and which has separate entrance and exit ways leading from/onto the main street which runs in front of the store.  Today as I started to turn into the lot someone pulled into my path...to exit from the entrance.   I pretended to turn into the nose of their car (advanced about a meter or so), and stopped...I wanted to make sure I froze the other driver in their tracks.  Then I drove into the lot on the right hand side of the entrance. Probably freaked out the other driver a bit.  Remember, we drive on the left side of the road in Japan.

When leaving the parking lot I swung to the right side of the exit and angled my car to about 45 degrees to the curb to wait for a gap in the traffic...and sure enough someone wanted to drive into the parking lot through the exit.  Since I was blocking the right side of the exit, which would be the left side for incoming traffic, the other driver had to wait.  The problem was their car was short and the lane they were in is wide.  So their car didn't block cars coming up behind them.  I had to wait for a break in the traffic to get out of the lot.  Meanwhile the other driver inched towards me and then braked.  Not sure what that was about.

So there's my traffic gripe of the day...people who enter a parking lot through the exit and others who exit the lot through the entrance.