Well, I was here in Tokyo for fireworks on my birthday, but Nature conspired to send a typhoon my way, which forced Tokyo to delay the fireworks. It wasn’t a total washout, I did manage to celebrate by going to Akihabara, which turned out to be much closer to my apartment than I originally thought, only a couple of stops on the subway. The fireworks will go off today, Sunday, but I had already made other plans for this evening, so I’ll end up going to one of the other Tokyo fireworks displays they have over the next couple of weeks.
And I don’t mean the song by Buster Poindexter from years ago, I mean the thermal climate has been ridiculously, dangerously, even deadly hot here in Japan.  The day after I got here, Monday, I had to go in from Narita down to Shinjuku, Tokyo, to pick up the key to my apartment, and it happened to be the hottest day so far.  My buddy John and I took the Narita Express train to Shinjuku, which was nice and comfortably air conditioned, but once we got off the train and started heading through the station, it wasn’t so nice.  We checked luggage into coin lockers (wonderful convenience that would never be permitted in Paranoia, USA) in Shinjiku station and walked out into the blast furnace/sauna.  It’s only a kilometer or so to the Sakura House apartment office from the station, but it only took about 5 steps to break into an unending sweat.  There were people all over handling the heat however they could, but no one was stopping the city from running.  It might have seemed to be moving a bit slower, though.
Once we got our keys we headed back to the station and got our respective loads of luggage from the lockers. Â I only recently figured out where the word “luggage” comes from, after lugging around my suitcase and helping John with his 4(!) bags in the heat. Â We were able to make the train, getting on a direct line to Monzen-nakacho, the neighborhood where the apartments are, riding the Metro with wonderful air conditioning. Â Once back outside, we discovered that the taxi stand we were expecting was no longer there, which meant a long, hot, miserable haul of luggage down the street to the apartments, “only” a couple of kilometers. Â Buildings A and B are only 3 floors high, which means there were no elevators, so I had to haul my single suitcase up to my room on the 3rd floor. Â Fortunately the air conditioning worked, and I turned that thing on as high and as cold as I could make it, to bring the apartment temp down to something approaching relief.
After collapsing in a puddle in the lone chair, I turned on the TV to see what was on, and happened on a special program where they were discussing the weather. Â I learned that we had been hauling our stuff around in temperatures over 41 degrees C, with humidities over 50%. Â I don’t know what that made the “heat index”, but 41 C is over 105 F, which is hot all by itself without the added misery of humidity.
At any rate, we survived, and I crashed in my apartment about 9 PM, after getting some drinks, a towel so I could take a shower, and a bit of food at the convenience store down the street. Â That should have been enough hauling around for the week, but no, I had plans for Tuesday…
So, I thought I’d try to be a little artistic with another one of my photos from Japan. I see all kinds of “art” photos where the photographer uses grainy black and white, so I thought I’d do the same with one of my more-or-less “artistic” photos, converting the nice clean crisp color photo to this B&W thing. This is a shot of one of the platforms at Tokyo Station. I was headed to Yokohama for the day, and it was well past rush hour so there was hardly a person there. “Crowded Tokyo” is very selective in its appearance.
I don’t know if this works as “art” or not, since I’m not an artist, but here it is anyway! I guess it kind of looks like an old photo, or something…
Chinatowns in all big cities are pretty much alike, but the one in Yokohama is very colorful at night, just like most of urban Japan, and much more so than the DC Chinatown. Here’s a prime example:
Urgh, I’m now on day 2 of a crappy head cold. It’s a little disheartening to learn the hard way that not all Japanese care enough about the people around them to cover their faces when they have a cold. In walking through crowds to and from stations, or standing on tracks in a crowd waiting for a train, I’ve seen a lot of people wearing the “surgical masks”, to keep from spreading their colds via coughing or sneezing. Unfortunately, some people in the crowds have not been so considerate, and I’ve been standing near people who let loose with a cough or sneeze, leaving their clouds of mucus and viruses for others to walk through. It’s hard to avoid them, too, when you basically have to keep moving behind them, or have to grab the hanging straps that have been grabbed by untold others.
At any rate, it hit me Monday evening, the sneezing, the runny nose, the crappy feeling. Tuesday I stayed in the apartment until the evening, when I decided I needed to get some kind of cold medicine, and some food and something to drink. A quick Google search of the expat sites for advice, a little research with my iPhone dictionary app, and I was ready to head to one of the local drugstores ( 薬屋, kusuri ya, literally “medicine shop” ) for some head cold medicine ( 風邪薬, kazegusuri, cold medicine ). I wanted something specifically for the symptoms I had, sneezing ( ãã—ゃã¿, kushyami ) and runny nose ( 鼻水, hanamizu, literally “nose water” ^_^ ). Fortunately I was able to convey this to the pharmacist, who pointed me to a box of something that had most of the words, and double-checked with him to make sure.
So, fortified with hope, I stopped at a combini to pick up dinner and some juice and soda. Different convenience stores stock different things, but they all have a hot food, cold food, and drinks section, so I picked up a tonkatsu meal, which is a fried pork cutlet, on scrambled egg and rice, and a bottle of Kagome vegetable juice. On the way back I passed a vending machine that carried hot and cold drinks, and so I decided to try a “hot lemonade”. Sure enough, a bottle of lemonade came out of the machine, very warm. I bought two, and they were still warm when I got back to the apartment. I drank the bottles of hot lemonade with the cold pills, and as I was eating the tonkatsu, the medicine started working on my cold. I called it an early night a few hours after that, but had to wake up a few times during the night with more sneezing.
Today, Wednesday, I’m feeling a bit better, the cold is still with me but not as bad, and the cold pills are doing their job. I figure I should be back up and about by tomorrow. Hopefully I just caught the same cold everyone in Tokyo seems to have, so that I have immunity and don’t have to worry about it anymore. We’ll see.
Here’s my magic combination that seems to be working on my cold!
So, almost everything put away that can be put away, one last batch of clothes in the laundry, and the apartment passed muster with the apartment management. Â Boarding passes printed for DCA and DFW, have to pack some things and repack others. Â So, a quick bite while the clothes tumble and then it’s nap time for a couple of hours. Â Ah, who am I kidding, there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep, I’m too hyped up! (which, if you know me, doesn’t appear much different from when I’m calm, but trust me, there’s adrenaline flowing!)
Oh, boy, it’s getting down to the wire, one more (partial) day of work, then I do the final prep work for the trip. Â One last go-around with laundry, packing up the laptop and a hard drive, assorted re-arrangements for the oddments and fripperies that I’ll be taking (cables, batteries, toothbrush, cash, books, etc), and then a short nap. Â The plan is to stay awake from midnight or so until I head to the airport at 4:00 AM. Â Fortunately I’m only about a 10 minute cab ride from Reagan National, and once safely ensconced in my (first class! Â woot!) seat on the plane I can grab an hour or so further nap en route to Dallas.
Had a bit of a scare this past couple of days, with the pain in my poor, poor tooth getting worse and worse. Fortunately I called the dentist this afternoon after struggling with lunch, and he told me to come in right away, from the symptoms he said he needed to carve away more of the tooth. Apparently I’ve been hitting the tooth whenever I chew, especially at night when I grind my teeth, and so the tooth socket wasn’t getting a chance to heal. In fact what I was doing was, in his words, “like running on a sprained ankle.” I have to admit I was skeptical, since I couldn’t feel the contact, but after just a few seconds of examination he figured out how much to whittle down, and while he was at it he touched up a problem with the bite on one of my new crowns.
He also surprisingly said that acetaminophen works better than ibuprofen or the other NSAIDs for post-dental work pain, in fact he said that they can actually slow the healing. Well, you don’t have to tell me more than once (especially when pain is involved) I walked right out and down to the grocery store in the strip mall and bought me some extra strength generic acetaminophen. Now, over 5 hours since he worked on me, and after two of the pain pills, I’m not wincing with every jaw closing, and it might even be getting better (finally!) Thank you, Dr. Dan Babiec!
So, I just have to focus on the last-minute little things like finishing up my apartment clean-up, telling the bank to let me use my ATM card in Japan, find out just how much or how little the insurance with my company will cover (I bought traveller’s insurance, for, well, insurance!) I’ve been packing clothes away, figuring out how much to take. I was a bit taken aback when I found that it was taking more room than the last time I went for a month, and I finally realized that packing 6 days worth of fall/winter clothes takes up a whole lot more room than 5 days of summer clothes! (I said I get it, I didn’t say I was fast!) So, I will probably add a gym bag of stuff along with my suitcase/backpack combo, and split the clothes between them in case one gets lost or left behind in transit. All the delicate/valuable stuff goes with me in my new camera/laptop backpack!
I was pleasantly surprised to see quite a few trees in this area turning colors, including some very bright yellow maples. Even better, there were two trees in the plaza at work that were just starting to turn orange and yellow, and to top it off, the color is on the sunset side of the trees! Naturally I didn’t have any camera better than my iPhone so I missed the brilliant colors set off beautifully by the setting sun, but I plan to have at least my small camera tomorrow at the same time!
I’ll get you my pretties!
I’m hoping this means that the trees in Tokyo and parts north will be coming into color about now, too, since they’re at about the same latitude, and we have roughly the same climate. But, being the downsider that I am, I’m prepared to make the most of the trip, even if it’s too late or too early for the colors.
