Caroline in Paris

Well, you’ll just have to excuse the obvious fabrication of my timestamps; I thought that this would be the best way.  See, someone (that’s what I call Nick when I’m being discreet) forgot to pack the power cord for the personal laptop that I dragged across eight time zones, so I’ve been scribbling on little sheets of dated hotel paper and waiting until I might have more than two minutes awake with his work computer so that I can turn them into something that a person might, you know, read.

First off–and this is from earlier, but let it go–check out this lovely photo Nick took on the observation deck while he was waiting for my (cursed, evidently) plane to land:

 

Anyway.

The next morning we went to Asakusa, home to the Kannon Temple and several phenomenally large paper lanterns.  Everyone else was touching the first one, and so I guessed that it was for luck and did the same:

Not three seconds later I tripped over an uneven patch of pavement, but I did not fall down.  “It’s working!” I cheered.  “Or else you just used it up already,” Nick pointed out.

Right.  There was an open-air market and just a generally festive air, and it’s probably still my favorite area.

Especially since I was resolved to try food without technically knowing what it was, and this holiday weekend had brought out the street-food vendors in droves:

Your guess is as good as mine, but it was phenomenal, whatever it was.  It did, however, lead me to my cultural nugget for the day: trash cans in Tokyo are painfully few and far between.  I carried the stupid sticky skewer from my snack for a good fifteen minutes before I spotted one, but–unlike in Paris, where there are trash cans about every three feet–the whole place is eerily clean. 

In fact, at one point I noticed a couple of policemen approach a young man carrying a used napkin.  One of them spoke to him, and then took the napkin in a white-gloved hand.  All three men nodded–impression of a bow, just a little thing in passing–and moved on.  Dropping one’s trash on the street, however convenient, is apparently unimaginable.

Ooh, and another thing: Japanese children are the cutest in the world, with the obvious exception of my nephews.  Like I said, it was a holiday weekend, so we got to see them all dressed up:

(Doesn’t she look just exactly like a Japanese Michelle?  I can’t get over it.)

On Monday, which was a national holiday, we went to see the Meiji shrine, hidden in the woods and hosting wedding after wedding–seriously, in the half hour we were there we saw five different ones, and the formalwear on the new arrivals on our way out suggested that that was no fluke.

“About ten, 15 years ago there was a trend to spend as much money as you can on a wedding,” Kanako explained.  “The crazier the better.  But now there is a reaction; young people want the simpler kind, that doesn’t cost so much.  The Meiji Shrine is good for that: cheap but with a lot of meaning.”

We paid 100 yen apiece for little scrolls of poems composed by the Emperor Meiji or by the Empress Shoken (both turned out to be touchingly appropriate), and headed out.  To the Imperial Palace, in fact, but by the time we had stopped for (an incredible) lunch, we were exhausted and it was beginning to rain, so we got back into the subway (if I were to design a subway it would be just like this) and came back to home base for a nap.

For dinner we decided to take a recommendation from one of our guidebooks (thank God we brought two; both have massive blind spots addressed in the other).  What it neglected to mention was that the place in question didn’t have an English name on its door; we had to find it by a painful process of elimination. 

Oh, and Penny’s complained that people here speak Japanese to her because she’s Asian: not true.  People here speak Japanese to her because they speak Japanese to everyone, even to those of us blatantly Occidental types who make goldfish faces at them while we try to figure out what’s going on. 

It was beyond worth the trouble, though; excellent beef shabu-shabu that just kept coming.  You know, I had this idea that Japanese food would somehow be…well, for lack of a better term, low-carb.  I mean, a little, at least: fish, tofu, vegetables, and some rice, right?  Yeah, no.  Pork and beef are huge, and our shabu-shabu (you cook the food in a bowl of broth, which is then re-cast as a soup) came with two varieties of noodle plus a generous bowl of rice.

And yet…it feels healthy.  I mean, maybe not at the time, especially with the quantities of sake that France has prepared me to consume.  But just on a walking-around basis, I’ve never felt like I was eating cleaner, better food.

It’s either that, at least, or the twelve hours of sleep out of 24, uninterrupted by pouncing psycho dogs.  Which, I’m sure, helps too.