My neighborhood

The landscaping around our apartment building is quite nice. This is the view from the street back toward our building. My apartment is out of sight on the left.The street that we are on is just a narrow side street, but we have a wide sidewalk and another path that goes around the buildings. This is the point at which they divide.
The sidewalk ends at a t-intersection and there is a mailbox. The symbol consisting of two horizontal lines with a vertical line below and connecting the bottom of the two horizontal lines is the post of mark. It is used on mail to distinguish zip codes from other numbers and on mailboxes and signs outside of post offices. Oh, it is also used on maps to indicate the location of a post office. This symbol is actually one of the kana phonetic characters. It is the katakana character standing for the sound /te/, where the /e/ is pronounced as the name of the letter A. It is appropriate because it is the first sound in the Japanese word for letter tegami.
A couple of hundred meters up the street, there is a grade school. It is only a few years old and was built partly because of all the kids that live in our complex.