Wine on the plane, for free, what a great fucking idea, makes for an easy landing. Rolling all of my luggage out of the subway stop and
down the Tokyo streets towards my Airbnb studio, there was no notable indication
I was anywhere special. No beautiful people, not many people at all in fact,
and no beautiful buildings either.
Where was the ornate beauty at every bend?
The crazy oddities? Thoughts started rushing through my head to all my
preconceived notions of Japan, of all the stories I had heard... none of which to my slight disappointment,
in those first moments, seemed to be true.
Challenging those notions is of course part of the joy of
traveling, that way you update the
checklist with more accurate ones. The moment we arrived at the apartment, I
almost breathed a sigh of relief. My then boyfriend who is six feet was
literally the same height as the doors. In fact, I later realized he was the
single tallest person, I saw at the end of a two-week period, period. Here we
go I thought, this is more like it!
Walking in the place was tinny, tiny. The bathroom,
including the shower was a 3x3 cell. Being 5’2 basically nothing is ever too
small for me but my knees hit the door while seated on the toilet! And the
shower was so narrow I only fit sideways, back or front to the wall without
hitting the curtain. At that point I was starting to feel that joyous feeling
of obviously being somewhere different.
 |
| Barley a pot to piss in |
 |
| Don't hit your head boo! |
In the light of day we came to realize that we were actually
only about four blocks from the vibrant heart of the Ginza district. Hello
shopping! I guess I could compare this to 5th Avenue in NYC but then
that would still be small comparatively. Streets were lined with white lights,
and skyscraping malls for days, all very tastefully decorated.
The scale of just this one neighborhood in
terms of impressive skyscrapers and bustling areas had me repeatedly thinking
that anyone visiting San Frnacisco from Tokyo must just think its so freaking
quaint and adorable. Our city ended up looking like a adorable little village
next to the empressive Ginza. And, well, that was just the tip of the iceberg…
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