Things I learned walking around Tokyo today

1) The Japanese are ingenious

People's exhibit a: I stumbled across a way-too-hip furniture store in Omote-sando (think Ikea, but less practical and more expensive). It's not a great place to put a furniture store, because the retail spaces are tiny. There's simply no space to display dozens of chairs and sofas. How to solve? A window full of tiny models. Yup, each piece was carefully re-created in miniature, about six inches high. Awesome! (unless you'd like to actually, I don't know, SIT on the furniture before buying it. Then you have a wee problem.)

Check out the marshmallow sofa.

Exhibit b: There's many things I love about buying clothes, and a few things I hate. One thing in the second category is finding other people's makeup on the shirt I want to buy. And nothing attracts big slicks of foundation like dry-clean only clothes, so once you've shelled out for the shirt, you have to pony up for cleaning before you can even wear it. Can the Japanese defeat this pesky plague? Of course they can! At the Gap, they give you a little "face-cover" (which, to be honest, looks a bit like a Klan hood) made of Kleenex-y material that you put over your head when you try on clothes. You keep your makeup; they keep their clothes from being ruined. Everyone wins, unless you somehow suffocate.

2) The Japanese are tiny
Size I wear at Gap, in the States: XS. Size I wear in Japan: at least a M. I'm not quite sure -- I gave up in horror when I couldn't even button a size S dress around my waist.

3) Demolition is fascinating in any culture
I couldn't help stopping to watch workmen dismantle a building piece-by-piece in the bustling heart of a shopping district. I thought I was being a tacky gaijin gawker -- until I saw a dozen Japanese people filming it with their cell phone cameras.

4) I can read a word!
A lot of signs in Tokyo are in English -- and a lot aren't. I've resigned myself to not ever really knowing what's going on. But today, for the first time, I looked at a sign written in kana and my brain didn't say "random jumble of kana and kanji that makes no sense to me.." It said, "No. Gi. Za. Ka. Oh my god. I know those characters! Nogizaka!"

(Full disclosure: At the time of this epiphany I was standing in the Nogizaka train station, so you don't have to be Elliot Stabler to deduce that the sign above the train station might say the name of the station. But still. I read it!)

Excuses, excuses

I got on the plane completely determined to become a regular blogger once I landed in Tokyo -- after all, now I have something interesting to talk about!

Total posts since I got here: zero.

Here's what's up: right now I'm living in government housing, and have no Internet access. I can post at work, or I can drag my laptop up to Roppongi Hills and try to find a hotspot. But I obviously can't upload photos at work, and I've written some posts on my laptop but have no way to put them online.

I meet Saturday with my realtor to start looking at apartments, so fingers crossed, this no-interwebs situation will be resolved soon. Otherwise I will go crazy.