The Devil’s Curly Hair
Eidan pretending to crash into posts, at the park adjacent to World City Towers in Shinagawa
I shot this video of Eidan at the park adjacent to the gargantuan World City Towers residential complex in Shinagawa. From Kai he learned the trick of pretending to bump into a pole and exclaiming “unh!,” as if he’d hurt himself. And here he’s doing it repeatedly. This park was a short walk from our apartment, and during the spring it was a daily destination for Eidan and I in the mornings. We’d play in the park after Maria left for work and Kai left for school, then I’d do our daily shopping at the wonderful Maruetsu grocery store. We’d go home for lunch, Eidan would nap for two hours while I worked, Kai would finish school, the three of us would go somewhere for a few hours, and then be home in time for dinner with Maria.
I enjoy doing write-ups of the parks we visited in Tokyo, but this one isn’t worth much commentary - it’s main attraction was that it was nearby. It’s a new park, and is quite large, but with only a few play structures, and an enormous, smooth gravel area in the middle. Every morning a workman came by to empty the trashcans, and sweep the entire gravel area with nothing more than an old fashioned Japanese broom. The one astonishing thing is that the grassy sections are strewn with rubble. It’s peppered with small pieces of broken concrete and tile, from the recently completed World City Towers. It’s just another idiosyncrasy of the otherwise fastidious Japanese: in so many ways they have the most exacting standards, but when it comes to parks, they’ll just throw grass seed down on top of the rubble and call it a day.
[tags]Tokyo, Japan, Shinagawa, World City Towers, parks[/tags]
