light vessel automatic

For the last two nights in Osaka, Alex and I stayed in a nice little hotel right in central Osaka, with traditional-style Japanese tatami rooms. When we arrived, it turned out to be right in a red-light district. The street outside had a weird, otherworldly feel to it – bizarre signs everywhere and strange ‘information booths’ that, while it wasn’t exactly clear what they were selling, were clearly not there to help lost tourists… A man stood in the street outside a bar in a long, pristine white jacket with the word “crutch” printed all over it in a bold, black, sans-serif typeface. We passed a car park that contained the largest collection of expensive cars with blacked-out windows that I’ve ever seen – a reminder of the fact that the Yakuza probably have a hand in most of the businesses in this part of town… Just along the road from our hotel, I took a photo of the window of a sex shop, which I have put here, partly so that no-one is shocked or embarrassed at having a picture of a sex shop window suddenly and unexpectedly pop up on their screen, but mainly because it is the details that make it interesting, so for it to be worth seeing, it needs to be bigger than the standard-size photos that I use on this page. Please don’t look at it if you are likely to be offended by the contents of a sex-shop window, which contains, among other things, a small picture of a naked lady, some moons and planets, and a porcelain dog.