Ted's the one on top. What more can I add?

Back in Tucson now, and somewhat recovered from jet lag. My last day or two in Tokyo is turning into a big blur, but I'll try to extract whatever data may still be intact.

Friday was very hot and muggy, but my pathetic failure to find a suitable sushi restaurant spurred me outside toward the Tsujuki fish market. I had no desire to go inside and see the actual fish-based transactions (which mostly happen before dawn anyway), but I was keen to try a sushi restaurant in the neighborhood. I went to one recommended by the hotel, and even though it didn't have a little conveyor belt I managed to order what I wanted without feeling like too much of a doofus. After lunch, I walked back the long way through the Ginza so I could pick up one last laptop brush at Sofmap, and then I headed back to the hotel to relax and cool off.

Ted wound up getting home very early, since he had no more customer meetings, so we just hung out until venturing forth for dinner. Italian food again (the best option for my little vegetarian), but at least this restaurant had outdoor seating, which was relatively smoke free. Very cool outdoor seating, I might add -- it was on the roof of a building, with other buildings towering around it.

Saturday was go-home day. We took the train to Narita airport, and after checking in we ate in the impressively large terminal food court and mall. There I finally had the conveyor-belt sushi experience -- hooray! I didn't eat much, though, and this was a good thing because not long afterwards came a 6.0 earthquake. I had never experienced that large an earthquake before, so I was kind of freaked out. Nobody else seemed to be bothered, and Ted, who had experienced the 1989 San Francisco quake (7.1) was quite calm as well. Strangely, the 4.0-ish Illinois quake I survived (thanks, New Madrid Fault!) hadn't really prepared me in the same way. The quake didn't delay our flight or have any other noticeable effect, so we were packed into steerage on Singapore Air and sent home.

Next stop, Paris! This trip will not be anywhere near as daunting as the trip to Japan, considering I lived in Paris for about nine months and am fairly fluent in French. So far I've prepared by researching public transportation options and vegetarian dining. We'll need to bring passport-sized photos so we can get a weekly Carte Orange (the Parisian transit pass, so much cooler than the touristy Paris Visite). I've dusted off my French by writing a nice email to Nicole, who is technically my uncle's ex-mother-in-law but functions as my affectionately bossy Parisian great-aunt. I'm practicing my oral comprehension by watching DVDs with the French language track on (hello, I'm jet lagged -- what else am I supposed to do?), and I hope to smooth out my pronunciation by singing along with my Serge Gainsbourg albums.

Sorry to end the Tokyo dispatches with a whimper, though I guess the earthquake counts as a minor bang!

After a sluggish morning, I dragged myself out for lunch, in search of sushi. It is embarrassing to admit that I haven't eaten sushi here yet, but I'm kind of intimidated by the language barrier. The restaurants sell sushi meals, but they all seem to include some weird item I wouldn't want to eat, and I'd hate to waste food like that. I haven't yet run across a sushi conveyor belt restaurant, where you can just pick what you want as it passes by. Well, that's not quite true -- I did see a restaurant like that but it was in the heart of a majorly touristy district, which put me off somehow.

So I planned to eat sushi for lunch, but I chickened out and ate Indian food instead, feeling rather glum and friendless in Tokyo (Ted was in Osaka all day meeting customers). The language barrier and the fear it provokes in me are a real problem. Anyway, after lunch I rode the train to Shibuya and Shinjuku, two garish neighborhoods known for neon and amusements. I strolled through 109, a mall famous for outfitting trendy schoolgirls, and although I didn't even come close to buying anything (not even the t-shirt that said "You can touch me if you like"), the experience didn't make me feel as old and washed up as I'd feared.

Incidentally, on the streets and in a shop I noticed a few surprising brand names. One was a pachinko/slot machine parlor called "Gaia." The other, more hilariously, was a cheap brand of men's underpants called "Black Man." Yowza!

But I digress. Getting home on the subway was challenging, as Shinjuku station is enormous, but I managed to get on the correct train in spite of a weird, non-obvious transfer. It wasn't very late, but I was still feeling sort of blue and just wanted to curl up with a book. But then, leaving the subway station, I heard a convincingly Beatle-like performance of "Please Please Me," so I followed the noise and discovered a music festival ("Beer Live!") in the nearby mall courtyard (did I mention that our hotel is in a megalopolis of malls?). Imagine how it brightened up my day to discover a Beatles cover band giving a free concert!

They sang and played very well, though the band members did not all have the same grasp on the lyrics. The fellow who sang "A Day in the Life" was seriously blurring the lyrics, to the point of adding a few extra syllables to "I'd love... to... turn... you... on..." (+ "urrr.... hooo"). I wound up meeting a zany couple from California (Japanese wife, American husband) and spending the evening with them listening to the show, while Ted zoomed and wobbled home from Osaka on the bullet train. The husband is 84 and the wife maybe 55 or 60, and they were both live wires: the husband got up and danced a while (nobody else did), and the wife and I talked about pop music (she recently attended a U2 concert). She helped me order food from the snack bar (yay!), and she also interpreted some of the band's banter. Honestly, stumbling across that dorky little concert and hanging out with that couple was the unexpected highlight of my day.

Not sure what tomorrow's plan is. I may ask at the hotel if there are any sushi conveyor-belt restaurants near the fish market, which isn't far from the hotel.

( Don't miss the very strange pictures from the concert )

More wanderings yesterday. I didn't have much time in the morning, since I was to have an early lunch with Ted and his colleagues, so I strolled to the nearby historic Shimbashi station, a mini-museum in a rebuilt 1870s railway station. But there was no obvious way to get inside. The ground floor has a restaurant, but it wasn't open yet, and I wouldn't have been able to ask for help anyway. But a little knot of older Japanese women started to gather, and I watched them as they, too, circumambulated the building, knocking on doors and windows. They were misdirected several times by the restaurant staff, but they eventually learned from someone that the museum was closed (not according to the schedule). I would have enjoyed seeing the museum, but it was quite entertaining to watch the growing flock of women (most wearing little downturned hats), and I felt I earned their esteem by showing interest in an obscure historic site and sitting patiently with my parasol overhead.

After lunch (unagi!), I went up to the Ueno district and visited the Tokyo National Museum, mostly with old Japanese and Asian art and artifacts. To be honest, I found it rather dry, but the walk was nice, and it was surrounded by some pleasant parks and gardens. Next I peeked down Ameyoko-cho, on the advice of Ted's Japanese colleague. It's a long street with many vendors selling a variety of, um, crap. Then I headed down to Akihabara, with its famed "Electric Town." There I dutifully hunted for a camera my father plans to buy, but it was actually more expensive here than in the States. So I left mostly unscathed, with only a card reader for my digital camera and a few more of those laptop screen brushes.

Dinner was mildly challenging, since Ted is a vegetarian and we have no way of asking whether a theoretically-vegetarian dish has been "enhanced" with fish in some surprising way. But we eventually found an Italian restaurant/bar that did the job nicely, all for around $20 (for the two of us). Better than Ted's Yokahama strategy in 2001, which was to eat veggie burgers at the nearby Hard Rock Cafe.

Today my feet are hurting, so I may look into a guided tour. Taking a guided tour usually requires me to swallow some pride, but I generally enjoy them once I'm aboard. I'll bring my camera, for maximum dorkiness.

BTW, there's a a very angry-looking landmark near our hotel:

In a move that will surprise no one, I bought a parasol today. I brought my huge Tilley hat to Japan, of course, but I saw so many women carrying parasols that I simply had to join in the shady fun. The parasols I saw were surprisingly pricey, but I just had my birthday and somehow felt entitled. No photos yet, but it's really quite pretty. And it may even be functional... the tag was all in Japanese, except for the big letters "UV." That has to be good, right? And it was made in Japan. Am I a good tourist or what?

A propos, this morning I walked around the nearby Ginza district, mostly because it was a short walk from the hotel. Not very interesting overall, except of course for the extremely interesting novelty of being in Asia. I thought the highlight would be visiting MUJI, which is basically the IKEA of Japan, but MUJI left me cold. Next door, however, was Sofmap, a big computer store. The familiarity of a computer store was comforting, and yet the foreignness made it fun. I managed to find the very accessory I'd hoped to find in Japan: a retractable laptop brush (I've coveted one ever since Ted's friend Perry impressed us with his).

I made it back to the hotel, and I even managed to find some very reasonably priced food for lunch (although I'm ashamed to admit it wasn't at all Japanese -- just a sandwich from a coffee shop). Then I went to Tokyo's biggest tourist attraction, Senso-ji, a huge Buddhist shrine. I didn't have a guidebook with me, and there was no documentation in English, so I just winged it. Which is why I'm now embarrassed to discover that I somehow missed the five-story pagoda. How is that possible?

The scene at Senso-ji was a little odd and quite alien to my Buddhist experience. There appears to be a tradition of offering loose change at shrines, and so there was the steady clatter of coins being tossed into grates and such. And people were doing something with rolled up paper and wooden sticks, presumably for luck or fortune telling. All the noise made me think of pachinko, or Skee Ball. But the smaller shrines were a little mellower, and there was a nice one with a row of lovely statues which were more familiar to me.

Tonight I'm hoping for some real Japanese food, and I think the odds are good, since we're dining with some of Ted's colleagues. And tomorrow I'm thinking museums (to visit, not to eat).

In Tokyo now. We arrived last night and haven't seen much yet, though we have quite a view from our hotel room. We're on the 32nd floor and are facing a weird red and white Eiffel Tower clone, and we're above some cool train tracks. One of Ted's colleagues advised against getting a room on the train side, but the tracks and trains look neato, and at 32 floors up, we can only barely hear them. It's nothing compared to our Southern Pacific exposure in Tucson, with the disgruntled conductors who provide ambience by blowing their horns at night.

Having received no advice about cell phone rentals, we tried out one of the airport rental companies, and I now have a nerdy little phone. It actually costs less to dial the US than to dial another number in Japan, but incoming calls are free, and I only intend to use it as an occasional walkie-talkie with Ted, who will be working all week. I picked a very distinctive ringtone, so I'll recognize my own phone among all those around me. Enjoy!