Here Chris is looking down on a tiny Japanese truck. Cars and trucks here are pretty interesting actually, some are much, much smaller than we are used to (to fit down tiny, cramped streets). Other than main roads there are very few sidewalks and the edges of the roads (and sidewalks when they are there) are full of speeding cyclists!

Like all island nations (British Isles, Australia, New Zealand, Japan, probably lots of others I’ve forgotten) they drive on the other side of the road. I knew someone in Toronto who had a little mini Japanese truck and it was fun because if you pulled up beside him on the road you could talk more easily through the driver’s windows next to each other.

People park here in amazingly tiny spots. I have no idea how they get into them and I assume that these parking spots were the impetus for the helpful backing-up-my-car-so-if-I-am-about-to-run-into-anything-then-go-off alarm that new cars are getting (though we would all use it for parallel parking). But the spots are really cramped, so much so that it is unclear if the home owner bought the house, measured the spot, and then went out and bought the largest car possible for that spot, or if they had to measure the parking for their car while buying the property.

Chris is impressed that we have a electric car charging outlet across the street from our apartment.

Chris went on a photo walk and here are a few of the pictures that he took.

First, some fellow photo walkers

Then our friend Joanne – note the seahorse lamp way above her head

And pink umbrellas

And NEW PIANOS

I didn’t want to wander around in the rain, so I joined them at the izakaya once they had finished photowalking and ate Karaage, which is Japanese for chicken nuggets.

Chris was very excited when we finally got a day clear enough to see the Sky Tree from all the way on the other side of Tokyo. The Japanese have just finished building the world’s second tallest free-standing structure. I’m afraid the CN Tower is way down the list now.

This is Rikugi-en park. We walked around and saw lots of crows and koi. There were two gardeners who we saw up in one tree trimming it carefully tiny branch by tiny branch by hand for several hours. I have a strong suspicion that no one ever does anything like that in North America. The two we saw and maybe others must be employed full time just trimming to the trees in this kind of shape – they are all beautifully taken care of (older ones with special stilts made for branches that look in danger of falling over).

Here is a typical Japanese street scene that we see when walking around. Note the cars driving on the wrong side of the road. I’ll need to see if I can get a photo that shows how small the trucks are here – they are very tiny and cute. In fact, there is a cement dispensing factory near our apartment, so I’ll get one of the little Star of Liberty cement trucks with their bright pink logo.

You can also see that these trees are also very, very carefully pruned (though they haven’t budded yet).

Also, right in the middle are two white vending machines. There are drink vending machines everywhere – I love them because they sell me bottles of hot green tea. (I haven’t see any with some of the more esoteric items that the internet assures me are sold via vending machine in Japan as well – maybe next week when we go to Akihabara.)

Saturday was fun!

We started out in Shinjuku because Chris wanted to look at used camera equipment. We had kaiten (conveyor-belt) sushi for lunch there. The stools were packed together surrounding two sushi chefs in the center of the conveyor belt and counter where we all sat and grabbed plates as they went around. It is hard to eat slowly there – everything looks delicious and just flies just in front of you. Also, you can see when they’ve made something new and usually you want to try it. The prices are different based on the colour of the plate and they have a chart on the wall that tells you how much each different colour plate is. When you’re done the waitress squeezes over and counts up your plates for you.

Then we walked to Shibuya. We stopped at different branches of a shoe store (named ABC Mart, no joke) because I brought the wrong shoes with me. We were packing and cleaning like crazy the last few days before we left and I forgot to get my boots from the shoe guys who were fixing the heels. So I ended up going to Tokyo in a pair of very old sneakers that Marisa gave to me years ago – she says that she originally bought them in 2004 at the old Don Mills mall. So I replaced them with new prettier sneakers with brightly coloured laces because I’ve decided that I can have sparkly multi-coloured laces while travelling.

Over the Shibuya scramble crossing, which must surely be one of the busies intersections in the world, is a Starbucks which we sat in to overlook the chaos. We didn’t take a picture, but this Google images link will show you what we saw: http://goo.gl/yJSgw.

Hiro and Joanne met us at Hachiko near Shibuya Station. Hachiko is a statue of a dog who has a very touching story associated with him about waiting for his master every day and then continuing to wait everyday after his master died – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hachiko. He’s a famous meeting place and I really wanted to meet at him, so they agreed. It turned out that was not the best idea since everyone in all of Tokyo wants to meet at Hachiko on Saturday nights. (Also I was late and had to stand on top of a bench to try to spot them.)

We were attending a charity event at a bar called The Pink Cow to support rebuilding after the Tohoku earthquake. We had a great time and met a lot of very nice people. There was a man named Norman who cooks and sells Jamaican food out of his house for a living. There was Shawna who organized the event. There was Shawna’s boyfriend Takeshi who, very strangely, went to grade school and high school with Chris and has worked as an artist for Marvel Comics. There was a silent auction to raise money and he donated an awesome drawing of Spiderman helping old ladies make rice balls. I REALLY liked it, but the starting bid was a little beyond my price range. That’s pretty much it other than a lot of beer drinking and chatting. It was a terrific day.

Can anyone help translate this?

Had dinner at a tiny restaurant just underneath our apartment. We weren’t actually sure it was a restaurant until a guy in yellow construction clothing stopped us while we were passing and told us we should have dinner there. We were just coming back from the grocery store’s fascinating after-6pm prepared food sale, so we said we would come the next night.

So we showed up the next evening around 5:30 and after sliding open the door we saw a cramped room with a bar and two small tables leading back to what looked like a living room. A tiny man, smoking, maybe 60, was seated at one of the tables. He jumped up when we came in – we said hello in Japanese and he gestured us to seats at the bar. Then he went behind the bar to turn a chalkboard with Japanese writing on it to face us. While the man was rushing around turning things on, I tried, not very successfully, to decipher this handwritten menu.

I ordered us three dishes – two that I could read (zaru soba – cold noodles; tempura) and one that I could just sound out (gyu – something – something – nabe). The only other thing I could read on the menu says omelet rice, which I wasn’t too sure about. He started cooking and Chris was distracted by ranks of large bottles with green labels. When we looked more closely, it was clear that they were old used bottles that had wax markings on the sides. We asked what it was (my Japanese is good enough to say ‘What is this?’). “Shochu,” he said (basically grain alcohol). We strongly suspect that he distilled it himself, but I don’t know enough Japanese to ask that and I’m not sure it would be a politically wise question anyways. He served us some in tall glasses mixed with oolong tea and ice and it wasn’t bad at all.

Then he gave us each a little plate that we hadn’t ordered with a tiny stick of grilled chopped-up octopus tentacles, some pickled vegetables, and a small pile of potato salad. The octopus was delicious. Then his wife came in and said hello (also in Japanese) and spoke with her husband and rushed back out again, “Kaimono,” (shopping) she said as she left.

We hung out drinking our tea-shochu until she came back and he continued cooking (we’re not sure which ingredients he was missing – he ran out himself after cooking the tempura to buy something else as well), and then attempted some conversation. Neither the man nor his wife spoke any English, so it was challenging talking with them – mostly we talked about the weather and how delicious the food was. The lady told us that the man we met the night before was their son and we had a chat about how warm the weather was (I’m good with words like son, daughter, father, wife, and also ones like warm, hot, cold, windy, etc.).

The man would cook us one dish at a time, so we had, in not at all quick succession, some kind of tasty simmered beef dish (the gyu-something), then the freshly fried crispy tempura (including celery!), some kind of spicy fish roe, zaru soba (the lady told us either that soba is difficult to eat or difficult to prepare – I wasn’t sure which), and some little pickled turnips. All came to about $30 – turns out the home-brew was very inexpensive. Only one other person came in for the 2.5 hours we were there (and he didn’t eat or drink anything, just gave them some money and took away a wrapped white package), so I’m not exactly sure what their business model is.

We’ll go back sometime, but we might be reduced to pointing to the list of menu items unless someone can help us translate/pronounce some more of them.