Here are two pictures of the area around my apartment building. There is a pond/lagoon nearby, and across that water feature is a small area of village-type houses. So it turns out that, despite that fact that I live in a nine-story building in a residential area of thousands of people, I actually feel like I'm not too disconnected from nature. And by that I mean that I get woken up by a rooster crowing every morning. The little path in my pictures goes around another big apartment building and is my favorite way to get to the bus stop (at least when it's not muddy). In America a path like this would have been paved a long time ago, but, well, we're not exactly in Kansas anymore.