roll for initiative

Too tired to write anything of much wit or substance today, so you’ll have to be content with random pictures from Tokyo.

Quick braindump on today’s activities:

• Woke up early and repeatedly.
• Went to the hospital to see Grandma. She woke up and recognized us all, which was great.
• Walked to Royal Host for lunch. Saw that they had something called “Black Demi” on the menu, which made me think of Angela Basset for some strange reason.
• I had the spicy chicken on rice, which was actually very good.
• Split up and hung out with Mom and Dad. Went to the Tokyo Museum of Modern art. Saw some cool pieces, especially 8 Scenes from Japan by Julian Opie. I’ll google that later.

I always get silly when I’m traveling with family, especially in Japan. Once I came here with my younger brother and we spent a full month honing our humor and jokes to be maximally effective … to each other. Unfortunately, this level of humor specialization does not generalize well to larger … or different audiences. After a month of completely cracking each other up, we came home to the silent stares and uncomprehending looks from our friends. I actually remember thinking ” … hmmm …, guess I have to recalibrate my humor again …”. Which is all a really long way of explaining this next shot:

This is a game my friend Matt introduced me to. The game is called “Ass or Elbow”. And what better time to introduce this game to one’s parents then when walking around the Tokyo Mueum of Modern Art … steps away from the Imperial Palace?

Back to the itinerary …

• Ate some sweet potato from the cart on the street. In New York you get hotdogs. In Tokyo, you get sweet potatoes.
• Took train back to parent’s hotel. Took picture of the “Women’s Only” subway car advert.

• Walked up and down crowded shopping-mall-cum-street. Very cool if totally busy shopping area.

• Bought a friend of mine a “Slim Mouth Piece” mouth exerciser. Not that she needs it. She’s got a gorgeous smile but I know that this will crack her up. I’ll do just about anything for a good punchline …

• Ate at a kaiten sushi place, which was really good. Though my mom suggested I try the fermented bean sushi. She described it as being both “interesting” and “good for you”, which should have been a clear warning that it would not be tasting anyting approaching “good”. As she predicted, it was interesting. If by interesting she meant slimy and gaggy.

All in all, it was a totally draining day. I’m going to hit the sack as tomorrow we’re getting up at the asscrack of dawn to go to the tsukiji - the big fish auction/market, where they sell huge tuna for tens of thousands of dollars. I think I saw something about that on the Discover or Food channels.

Oh, last thing. Tokyo still has a ton of Japanese. Last time I was here I was struck at how many Japanese are here. And it’s still the same now. I WAS counting, and we saw about 2 dozen gaijin today (not counting Mom and SiL) and we probably saw about 5000 Japanese. Yes, some of you will say “no shit” but growing up in the states does not prepare you for such homogeneity. I guess maybe if you’re in the middle of Wyoming you’d expect everyone you see to be white. But then again, Wyoming has a population of about 500K, which tokyo probably has about 20 mil. So take NYC, double it in size, and change the demographic so that it was about 99.9% white and 0.1% non-white and you’d get close to seeing how many japanese people are are in Japan. Crazy…

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