TimesToCome

This afternoon we tried lunch, we had to point at the photos, they didn’t speak English and we didn’t speak Japanese, but the food was great.

We wandered over to the gadget district, the signs and buildings were fascinating, the gadgets not so much. Every where there are young men hawking like carnies and young girls barely dressed handing out flyers for various stores.

Later we found our way over to the ‘Times Square’ like area of the city, lots of lights and flashing signs everywhere.

Our blue jeans and sneakers give us away as American more than the cameras. The men are all in black suits, the women in black skirts. The young girls skirts are higher than the tops of their stockings. The young men all have their hair teased. The construction workers all wear pants that billow out like bell bottoms but much more so, I don’t know how they don’t get tangled up in them.

The subway’s painless, no different than taking it in Boston and not crowded at all, we had seats every trip. At each train station is an underground mall with restaurants and stores. It’s much like the tunnels in Houston but with many more people and shops.

So far we’ve been lucky and all the menus have had photos we could point to, the average person here doesn’t speak English.

It’s a very large city yet we’ve seen extremely few people who are not Japanese, less than 6 of the thousands of people we crossed paths were were not Japanese.

I know why everyone wears surgical masks – people here don’t cover their mouths when they cough.

No one, not a single person carries a backpack. You see brief cases and brief cases on wheels like airport luggage.