Wednesday, July 4, 2007

Japan: week 1

I landed in Japan a few days ago. The trip here was pretty exhausting--if it was a scene in a movie, it would have been one of those scenes where the guy is all disheveled and a bunch of neon signs are spinning around his head against a black background, and he's staggering around all confused. Well, that was me. Thankfully, I had lots of help getting to my destination, so it all went without a hitch, but it was a hugely disorienting and semi-stressful for a relatively un-savvy international traveller like myself.

For the 1.5 people who will read this blog, I'm hoping to post a fair amount of pictures--Japan really is every bit as hilarious as I hoped and dreamed it would be, and I will do my best to catalogue that. There is a staggering amount of Engrish, which is strange, considering the fact that everything else Japanese people do seems to be absolutely flawless. Everything here is clean, people are quiet and polite,machines are tiny and precise, and yet the English I see is endearingly bad. Anyway, this first post is rambling, I know, but you're already wasting time reading a stupid blog, so I don't feel too bad about that. I'll try to get a few pictures up today and then start writing more coherent posts in the future--for now, though, I just wanted to get something written to test out the format, etc.

Here's some pictures:

These are from a Japanese cake store. Everything was tiny and perfect. Like a beautiful Swiss watch that goes straight to your thighs.

Apparently there actually are places like this in Japan. No Samurai jumped out and kicked my ass, but if they were going to, this would be a good spot.


This has nothing to do with Japan, but I saw the picture in a book at the school I'm teaching at and I laughed my ass off. These two zonked-out free spirits are pushing their groovy product in a book for children!


PS- click on the pictures to make them all big and fancy if you didn't know that.

2 comments:

Lisa said...

Those cakes are pretty! Have you seen the plastic food yet though? That to me is so so Japanese. That book looks like Richard Scarry, though I didn't know that Big Pharm had taken over children's literature... Keep blogging and I will keep reading!

Anonymous said...

yeah and then on the next page the gorilla sells off his wrist watches, one by one, for just a little a more of that sweet, sweet rock.
sad story really.