Barbie Princess Dream Church

EEeeeee! I walked by again! There is a school with the church behind the gates and all the kids wear Sailor Moon uniforms with the red bows. I got some more detail is all.

Sacred Heart of Jesus

I also felt unselfconscious enough to take pictures of part of my street. My place is around a couple bends from here.

These are all residential, but on the first floor of many buildings there are businesses: hair dressers, a laundry service across from my building, a drink cafe and a separate noodle cafe around the corner of another building. One of the hairdressers likes to blast discotheque and Celine and Whitney into the evening. Some buildings have bodega-like convenience stores that bleed into residential space as you go deeper. You're looking at tiny shelves crammed with shampoo, toilet paper, drinks, sample packets of detergent hanging on string from the ceiling, bulk rice and ginger on the floor, and suddenly there's an old lady looking at you because you're in her living room.

Culture lesson! Every shop, every restaurant, and quite a few residences are open to the street on the first floor - not just here, but major roads and shopping areas. There are walls structurally separating spaces, but the entire ground story airs out onto the sidewalk and at night everything is closed up by metal garage doors. Typically only offices, upscale, and western-style businesses will be enclosed by doors and walls. Residential buildings have gates and doors, but during the day only the wrought metal gates with narrow slats are used and you can see in and hear people hanging out in their living rooms, eating, watching tv, doing homework. The two pharmacies I've found were counters that you step up to from the sidewalk. A bakery near my apartment has a sidewalk counter and curbside service, so people will pull up on their motorbikes and order breakfast to go. This made it difficult at first to tell what was what, not because I couldn't use my eyes, but because of the conflict between expectation and presentation.