02.10.05, Tokyo

I wake up early because the sun is shining and my ass is very sore (must have pulled some muscle while dragging the bags the day before). Actual getting up, however, takes some time for all of us, and it's after twelve when we finally go out. It's excruciatingly hot.

Ookayama (and, as I later learned, pretty much any other Tokyo neighborhood) is full of life in the ways in which neighborhood in Europe or the US almost never are. Here is Helsinki the area around some outlying subway or train station, with the exception of very big ones like Malmi, usually has some essential services, such as a supermarket, an ATM, a video rental place, a pharmacy and a bar. Japanese neighborhoods are more like downtowns of small towns, with lots of shops and restaurants, etc. Ookayama has a semi-pedestrian shopping street, a sort of main square around the subway station, a post office, two supermarkers, one big bookstore and at least two small ones, a few pharmacies, a few bakeries, pet stores, harware stores, a 100-yen store, many restaurants, etc. People walk or ride bikes within Ookayama because there is no public transportation apart from the subway, and no parking spaces. There does not even seem to be enough bicycle parking space for everyone.

Local streets usually have sidewalks painted on them, but nobody seems to care much. People walk and ride bikes all over the street and if a car shows up it moves very slowly and people and bikes usually let it pass. Most bikes have a basket built into them to put shopping bags into.

There is an unbelievable amount of cables in the air all over the country. That's because they don't keep cables in the ground on account of earthquakes.

We go to Shinjuku. The Shinjuku station is so full of people that it's hard to walk there but we make it out of there and go to Himawari sushi where we are supposed to meet Yoe and Sty and their friend Simo. Sty and Simo are there, and Yoe comes a minute later, carrying very cute boots that she bought from somewhere.

Himawari sushi is a kaiten-sushi restaurant, which means that people sit around a big counter and little plates of sushi move around on a conveyor belt. If you want something that is not there you can always ask. Plates usually contain two pieces of nigiri or four pieces of maki and are color-coded to show the price. Usually expensive fishes are, well, more expensive, but some places just have all sushi the same price and if the fish is expensive there are fewer peices of it. There are saucers for the soy sauce all around the counter, bottles of soy sauce, jars of pickled ginger, mugs, green teabags and faucets with hot water. In Himawari the usual price is about one euro per plate, and the quality is good. In other places prices and quality vary but I've never seen a really expensive kaiten-sushi place.

I discover the best fish ever, bintoro. It's pink and delicious and some kind of tuna.

After lunch Yoe helps me exchange my Japan Rail Pass exchange order for the actual pass, and then Yoe and Sty go somewhere and the rest of us buy some beers and go to the park that surrounds Meiji shrine. It's unbearably hot. At some point they close the park and kick us out, and we go to see the shrine itself. It's big and dark, and there is a lot of sacrificial sake.

After that we go to Harajuku, the neighborhood full of funnily-dressed teenagers and delicious-looking crepes and little stores with funny clothes.

At some point Simo goes home and we go to some tower in Shinjuku through a lot of underground tunnels. I am so tired I could drop and dissolve but I can't well miss the tower. From the tower we see lots of lights, and we also see that all large buildings and some small ones all over the city have some strange slowly-blinking red lights on them.

We go home, have tea, Joy and Krabak go to the night bus to Kyoto and I say hi to their hamsters and pass out.