Tokyo, first impressions

Already three days I feel like I am from Mars, or maybe from Venus (as John Gray reserved Mars for men). I don't speak the language and I am completely excluded from the whirlpool of everyday life. I am not even noticed like in Shanghai, where foreigners often mean potential good business. I feel like I am invisible and have an advantage to watch, I am a fly with a camera. People are busy here, they know where they are going and they don't bother with the rest. Or maybe it just feels like it, as I most often don't. I mean it literally, very often I find myself some place that I can't locate on the map. As the street names rarely have English script and maps don't have pictures of the places... If I would be looking for something specific, I would probably get worried, but I am just wondering about.


Today it was Shinjuku, just one district or ward (ku they call it in Japanese), but took the whole day (well, this one district accommodates as many people as the whole country me and some of you are currently residents of). Well, discount for some time in Starbucks - hiding from the rain and boosting up energy (local coffee shops are often full of cigarette smoke, as smoking inside is allowed; strange as smoking outside is not and there are places designated specially for smoking. I'd walk in and, while queuing up, feel dizzy and rush out for some air... and go and find Starbucks. I don't even like their coffee, but it is a place I can be at). In many places, Starbucks attracts the young and the 'wanna be cool' people. In Tokyo you can find all kind of people there, as many young as old; sometimes families stop by, and of course foreigners.

Shinjuku is great for shopping; my favorite stores are there, Zara, United Colors of Benetton, H&M, even BoConcept...


It is nice to just walk around, especially closer to the evening, when the streets light up and it seems the whole country should work just to keep this ku's screens and banners on and blinking.


I checked out the bookstore (7 floors! - stores rent or own houses and those houses are generally high, but rather narrow. So lots of stores stretch up vertically rather than horizontally . Same with the restaurants. Imagine 4-floors McDonald's). Books in Japan are smaller - shorter in length, so they appear cuter. Also they are printed and read from right to left; so for us it'd feel as if we are reading a book from the end (I do it sometimes). The characters could be arranged either vertically (more often) or horizontally (in this case the books look like ours, left to right print). Same applies to magazines.


On the way back I hit the traffic. Shunjuku is always crowded, but this time (around 7pm) they barely could fit on the platform. Some needed to stop on the stairs and wait until the train picks up the spilling over crowd. The train and metro systems are still a puzzle to me. There are a few points where you use your card even before you take a train (as there are different operates - train, metro, private lines), sometimes it feels I pay just to be walking underground. I get home by chance as I have no idea what the address is, neither would I care as the streets are not identifiable. I often follow the crowds, or just walk where the lights show green or where it looks nicer. It works somehow, so far...

Btw, I could not resist walking into Shinjuku passage, which is a playing parlor. Hundreds of machines are arranged in multiple rows where chain smoking males (and couple of females) stare at the screens and lazily push buttons. This is gaming Japanese style.