Today I found a detailed map of my immediate neighborhood in my mail. It shows every house in the vicinity, the larger buildings with several apartments show up with their building names, for example “Riverview Heights”, the private houses are marked with the names of the family living there.
The map also indicates places where you can find water tanks in case of a fire – underneath my building there is one marked with the number 20, which probably means 20000 litres – although I’m not sure a private person would be able to access them; as well as the closest public Automated External Defibrillators – in my post code area alone there are four, and three more just across the boundary. There are also two disaster shelters in nearby schools, but it seems they can only hold a total of 700 people, which is not very much. Probably they are meant only for the very old, very young, and very infirm, and middle-aged, middle healthy people like myself may sleep on the streets in case of a strong earthquake.
What surprised me looking at the map were the sizes of the area reserved for the schools, but then again, every school seems to have their own athletic grounds attached, so not all of the space is used up by buildings. Also, there seem to be an awful lot of parking lots all over the place, some of them – called garage even though they may not be covered – belonging to the larger apartment buildings, but many others are just small paid parking lots, which often pop up temporarily whenever a house is torn down and not rebuilt immediately. There is one nearby that provides space for exactly two (in numbers: 2) cars. I don’t really see the point in this, it would have been nicer to plant a tree there, but unfortunately there’s no money to be made from trees…
I was looking forward to discover some new restaurants around here, but I was disappointed. The map was paid with advertisements, so only the advertiser’s shops are highlighted, and obviously most of the ads use Kanji I cannot read – so I am none the wiser. Some of the ads that I can read, however, are hilarious in their use of English. For example we have the Natural Foods shop “Help”, a restaurant obviously employing a “kitchengorilla”, and there is this shop called “pet feeling Mink”, the purpose of which I’ll leave to your imagination…