Weekend Bike Ride - March 6

On March 6th, I went biking around the city.  No real reason, just wanted to bike for a while.  I did a nice loop like this (detailed map here).

Well, that is part of the map missing the first bit but you can extrapolate.  Initially, I biked through Meijo park (near the Nagoya castle) to see if anything changed with the ume blossoms.  Here is the moat around the castle and the large fortification walls:

 Big walls and moat.

 Here is a view of the castle with it's gold dolphins:

 An empty guard building on the wall corner:

 Here is a nice lake in Meijo park with nice fountains:

 The ume trees didn't change much and I didn't notice any new ones flowering:

Then I kept riding south.  Here are some views along the way:

 I biked along a main Nagoya highway that is on street level:

 A nice looking temple:

 Big intersection:

 Here is a large intersection with the road that goes to Nagoya Train Station (building seen in the distance):

 The other side of that (pictures were taken from a pedestrian/bicycle overpass - I love those for pics):

 And view south from the same place:

 Went through a nice park which turned out to be the one near Sakae that I often go by but from a different angle/street.  I found a nice fountain and walkway from this way:

 Also, found a very skinny rabbit - where is this from?

 The science museum.  I need to go to that new planetarium (the ball) - it is supposed to be the largest in the world or something.  In front you can see a whole building torn down which is quite common sight in Japan.  Basically, old buildings get torn down completely and new ones built - might have something to do with the earthquakes.

 Just slightly south of the park was OSU.  Here is the large OSU kanon temple.  While at OSU, I ate that sakura fish pastry from the food blog.

 Not sure what this is... but nice aquarium fish on the building:

 As you can see it was already getting dark.  This is the main street into Kanayama.  Very interesting since it doesn't look very busy from this picture but only about 100m and it is crazy busy part of town.

 Went by the conveyor belt sushi place I ate at a few weeks ago where we waited like over 1hr for a seat.  This time there was also a huge line up so I didn't go in.

 Further south, I went by the huge Atsuta shrine (from my new year blog post):

 A little bit past the shrine, I came upon one the start of the large canals that go to the bay and the ocean.  People have boats parked along the canal.

 I didn't go any further south but that would be this way:

 Basically, from there, I tried to go east but that was a bit complicated due to the roads crossing railroad tracks and the sidewalks stopped.  But the good thing is that I found a huge Book Off store (used books):

 And an awesome sushi place where I waited about 45mins for a seat but I was hungry and it was getting late.  Sushi was great (already covered in the last food blog post).

 Then I somehow managed to take a different route and was able to go east until the Aratamabashi subway station and then I headed straight north along another large road.

 Which basically went all the way to Imaike and home.

Nice ride at about 30km total that day.