Travelogue #1: Tokyo.

Hooray! I'm alive. I'm sitting at the tiniest desk in the tiniest hotel room I have ever seen in my life at the Shinjuku Washington Hotel in Tokyo. My head and whole body aches because I haven't slept in 18 hours (13 hour plane ride!) and I'm horribly jet lagged. It's 9 pm here but I'm trying to keep myself awake long enough to go to bed at a semi-normal hour so I can wake up at a semi-normal time tomorrow. So if this blog trails off mid-sentence, know that it's because my head drooped over the keyboard in a failed attempt to stay conscious.

I just went into the little hotel drug store downstairs to try and buy some face wash, as I had forgotten mine, but since everything was in Japanese, I couldn't tell which bottle was which and got a little worried at the possibility of lathering foot cream onto my face if I chose the wrong bottle...I combed the racks and found a couple bottles which may or may not have been what I was looking for, with no english description except for this written under the huge japanese block letters: "menthol and ginger gives pleasant tingle sensation when applied." Hmm. Nice, but a little vague. The only other thing that i saw was "Men's face wash." Men's? What about the women's? I took the bottle and brought it up to the lady at the register, dumbly asking in English whether they had WOMEN'S face wash, because this was men's. She looked at me and went, "Men-zu?" I said yeah, Men's. She went to go browse the rack herself, coming back a minute later with a white bottle labeled FACIAL WASH - presumably for both sexes - and exclaimed, "Men-zu!", thrusting the bottle at me, having obviously thought that Men-zu meant "face wash" in English and looking like she had just split the atom. for a moment I felt pretty arrogant and ashamed for wondering why she didn't speak English, feeling that American egocentrism kick in; the belief that the whole world should be able to speak English because we do. I thanked her, and after struggling a little with the Yen to pay her, went on my merry way.

In my 3 hours of being here the most noticeable thing for me is that the Japanese have an overwhelming penchant for all things small. Tiny pillows, tiny TV, tiny trash can and desk, tiny toothbrush and toothpaste. Everything is very neat and clean and orderly, not a wrinkle to be found in the sheets, not a thing out of place. The young people around here are all trendy as hell...all the girls are impossibly skinny and all wear loose, baggy shirts with tight black capris and high heels, and the boys all seem to favor a kind of spiky, sideswept rockstar 'do with popped collars, wide-rim glasses, dog tags, and skinny jeans.

i'm exuberant at the thought of seeing the city tomorrow. My dad and I are going to see a sumo match at some point this week, which i'm really excited about. And I've definitely hit that wall of tiredness, so I'm giving in...until next time...kjdsghfnDL?EWv