Travelogue #3: Tokyo

Jet Lag is a pain in the arse. Sitting here at 3:10 am for the 3rd night in a row hoping to facebook chat and catch up with people from home and just generally having my mind being overwhelmingly tired and groggy but my body restless and wide awake. Today's our last day in Tokyo before we fly down to Singapore tonight. 7 hour flight!! In my western ignorance I guess I assumed all Asian countries were just a hop, skip and a jump away from each other, but nope. It's like Cher's dad said in Clueless about L.A. : "Everywhere in LA takes 20 minutes!!!" Funny how that's stuck with me after all these years. Although to be fair, Clueless did define my adolescence (or early adolescence, anyway).

Last night my dad and I went to eat some sushi (surprise!) and while I was sitting there in the booth waiting for our food I kind of zoned out and started looking all around the restaurant, noticing that the Japanese businessmen all sitting at the bar didn't seem to be talking at all. And if some of them were, it was nothing more than a murmur, or a faint whisper. That's the custom over here in these collectivist cultures - the overwhelming desire for unobtrusiveness, modesty, not trying to attract too much attention to yourself. Even when we were riding the subway I looked around and everyone was either immersed in a book, looking directly down into their laps, or sleeping. It was totally silent. Anyway, as I was sitting there thinking about all this, Lady Irony decided to pull a fast one on me and I dropped the cup of tea I was holding so it made a huge crashing sound on the table and caused all the tea to pour into my lap, through my white dress, scalding my thighs. I let out a sort of animalistic scream of pain and the ENTIRE RESTAURANT went silent, if it was possible for it to be more silent than it already was. But it was a different kind of silence - this was a LOUD silence. Every murmur stopped, every single head turned, the waitress flipped and started running around like a chicken with her head cut off, shouting, "Serimasen!! Serimasen!!" (which means I'm sorry). I kept going "it's okay, it's okay!" But she ran to get me some towels anyway and when she came back, started frantically dabbing at my wet dress, yammering away in Japanese, then actually lifted up my skirt and started dabbing my bare legs with the towel!!! (At this point everyone quickly turned back around.) The whole thing was just absurd and silly and hilarious to me, and so I just started laughing, and once I started I couldn't stopped. This appeared to be a bigger scandal than the whole spilling tea debacle, which made me laugh even harder. I'm such a lady, huh?!