Dear all,
A lot of people will receive this, and to some of you it might be a unsolicited mail: it will hopefully make a vaguely interesting read. I have to use English (that, in my opinion, is a sort of barbarian language - they were able to screw up the whole phonetic system) because the audience is quite international.
I'm writing from a small room in a two-storey edifice at the periphery of Tokyo. As you know, I'm not a tourist here, as I will stay as a visitor for 3 months at the Hirose-Yoneda laboratory at Tokyo Institute of Technology.
I arrived here three days ago. It's my third time to Japan: every time the first days are similar to a strange dream (sometimes, a nightmarish dream). I get projected in this strange alien world where I don't understand the writings, or what people tell me, or more generally what is going on around me because I haven't slept properly for days and I begin to think that maybe a considerable number of my neurons didn't get through passport control.
For example, yesterday I was awake at 3 AM. As I could not fall asleep again, at 6 I went out to Shibuya, one of the busiest places in Tokyo. Instead of about 35 min., it took me over two hours to get there because of multiple errors in the choice of tracks - you really need all your neurons to use the Tokyo transportation system (compare this map with this one). Anyway, at 8:45 I was at Shibuya, only to discover that practically everything was closed and would not open until 10:00. Fortunately, Starbucks was open and I could get myself something resembling an espresso.
That espresso helped me to make the only productive thing of the day: buying a digital camera (that's a common cliché for tourists here).
So, I can now show you the first thing that you see entering my house.
Yes, here we have some friendly pets of various species. I was about to leave the place, but people say that it's not uncommon in Tokyo houses.
And here's my room.
I went to Harajuku today, a place where teens go to dress up and show themselves to a crowd of photographers.
The costumes are inspired by manga (comics), anime (cartoons), video games, or simply by fashion; the themes change periodically, for example, I could not spot nothing similar to those from this gallery, except, of course, for the eternal classic of the gothic lolita.
These two are characters from the "Final fantasy" video game.
And this is an example of the "decorator" style.
Enough for today. You can use Skype to reach me: my user-id is "censia". Keep in mind the time difference of +8hours (when it's 8:00 in Europe, it's 16:00 in Japan), and that I often leave my computer unattended.
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