From Tokyo to Nagoya on the Shinkansen

Our last full day in Tokyo was spent downtown because Amy had a meeting at Fulbright.  This meant that I was in charge of the kids, which broke two cardinal rules of parenting; first, never be in charge and, second, if you find yourself in charge, never allow yourself to be outnumbered.  Luckily, Lily was too tired to move anything other than her eyes, so she decided to spend the two hours reading in a corner while Amy's Fulbright contact told her what to do in the event of a tsunami.  So that left me with Tessa, who immediately asserted that she "needed Starbucks."  This proved to be an unforced error as a parent, as giving Tessa caffeine is like giving Adderall to a Jack Russell Terrier.  I was able to bring her down through a sustained and severe embarrassment caused by my existence.  

Then we went off to explore the city.

A few steps from Starbucks we found the stairs to a shrine.

I have no pictures of the shrine itself, as it is apparently embarrassing to take photos in public.  Unless they are selfies of 13 year olds or pictures of "really hawt guys."  My selfies do not fall into either category.

Tessa and I also skirted the parliament building, which is surround by ten foot barbed wire fences and signs ordering you not to take pictures of the parliament building.  After an exhausting march around parliament that was no doubt surveilled by very bored Japanese special ops, we reunited with Amy and Lily.  We experienced abject failure in finding a restaurant that served vegetarian food, so we returned to Daiba and ate snacks from 7 Eleven.  We then spent the rest of the afternoon and evening exploring a flea market in a mall.

The next day we left for Nagoya!

Bullet train.  The name says it all.  But instead of five assassins, it's four Douglasses.

Buying tickets for the Shinkansen very nearly exceeded our resourcefulness and completely exceeded our language skills.  Yet we were finally able to purchase tickets through a creative combination of repeating English words over and over again and full body pantomime.  Then we rushed to the platform to see our train waiting.

It was there that we had our first international incident, when we had to politely confront two passengers who were sitting in our seats (9-D and 9-C).  Amy assumed her firm tone that she uses with Murphy when he's wedged his bulk into the nether regions of the dishwasher.  She prominently displaying her ticket, which clearly showed that she had seat 9-D, and said 'our seats.'  Or something.  I wasn't really listening, as I was developing an exit strategy in case things got rough.  There was a confusing moment of cultural miscommunication during which the passengers spoke rapidly and repeatedly pointed to the time on the ticket (10:09).  I was like yeah, 10:09 people.  We got places to be.  

The core problem is that we were on the 9:59 train.  Now I'm sure all of you know that this would never have been a problem in America, where trains do not run every ten minutes.  That would be insane.  Luckily, I had been waiting to unleash a torrent of sumimasens (I'm sorry).  A couple of those with an arigato thrown in and we were  back on the platform waiting for the 10:09 train with crisis averted.  As we boarded our train, part of me really wanted someone else to be in our seats.  But it turned out that everyone else knew how to tell time.

Wait, I'm sitting next to dad??

We were able to see Mt. Fuji for about fifteen seconds as the bullet train bulleted by.

Then, suddenly, we were in our new home city.  Nagoya.  

This is Tessa stomping to the hotel.  I can't remember why.  It probably had something to do with me existing.

Signage Part 3

As long as I can remember, my father has been fascinated with signs.  Throughout my childhood (and adulthood), our walks and deep meaningful conversations were frequently and abruptly truncated by a familiar pattern; he would stop, whip out a camera and take a picture of a 'help wanted' sign.  To be fair, some of those help wanted signs were pretty unique.  One time in the UK, we saw an advert for "Bar seeks waitress.  Only the well endowed need apply."  Not necessarily what you'd see in the states.  But still.  I was pretty sure I was saying something important.

In any event, I thought he'd appreciate some of the signs we've been seeing.

 

Okay, I know this is not so much a sign as a really angry foodstuff.  But it left me wondering ... did they do any focus groups on this?  You know, compare this psychopath red dino who seems to be saying 'eat me or else' to a happy blue dino saying 'I taste good and I'm smooth going down.'

Come on people.  Mind out of the gutter.

This fish is either a) the road's mascot, b) a way to make you pay attention to the fact that there are earthquakes so major that they close the emergency roads, c) one possible cause of a major earthquake (massive falling fish) or d) an advertisement for a nearby sushi restaurant that remains open during natural disasters.  

Emergency road closed due to earthquake?  Come on down to Bob's Sushi.  

So far, the signs have been pretty threatening.  Welcome to Tokyo.  Earthquakes, Tsunamis, Angry Red Dinosaurs.

I don't know what they have against dogs, because what harm could a little pasturing do?

I would not have considered golf an inherently dangerous activity, unless we are talking about the new hybrid sport, MMA golf.  It's true that the crowd went wild when Mickelson made Woods tap out on an arm bar, but that's definitely not something you want to see in this area.

Sometimes, I think they have some extra space on the sign and so throw in a pretty unlikely prohibition.  Midnight windsurfing?  Maybe it's a thing.

Subway advertisement for feline specialized clothing.  I know, I know.  Technically lions are Panthera and only distantly related to cats.  If you think specialized feline clothing isn't a thing, you haven't been to Japan.

This isn't a photoshopped pic or something I downloaded from the dark web or a wanted poster.  No, this is real.  Cat cafes.  A place where you can go to drink a cup of coffee and be scared shitless when a cat jumps on you out of nowhere.

There was a woman standing by the side of this sign with two cats stuffed into her kimono.  You can see her foot at the bottom right.  I wanted to take a picture but I thought it might be disrespectful and my eyes started itching.  For those allergic to cats, the cat cafe is the equivalent of a CIA black site.  Waterboarding?  Hah.  How about a kitten rub down?!

This box pretty much confirmed every QAnon conspiracy theory I repeated mindlessly when I got sucked into things I read on the internet.  Human Shape Snacks!  You know Soylent Green is made of people, right? 

You've gotta be thinking exactly the same thing I was thinking.  What words came before that?  Bona fide?  Authentic?

And what does it say that the human shape is the same as a can of Coke or a package of cigarettes?

"Come back soon!"
Sob.
It's like the universe saying we made a mistake.

Correction

My astute daughter Lily inadvertently called me funny when she said 'Daddy, how do you make funny things come out of thin air."  That's a win.

But that's not the correction.

Lily noted that there was a serious error in my Christmas letter.  I wrote that she was the sole professional author of the family.  I was wrong.  When I wasn't looking, it turns out that Amy published a few journal articles and chapters and "an edited book and a textbook.  Do you mind??"  Tessa is now working on a biography of Murphy.  So when that gets published, I'll get to be the sole something.

Plumbing the depths of plumbing in Japan

A few years ago, one of our friends muttered that we needed to include trigger warnings for some of the posts.  Apparently, he had been reading the blog during breakfast and happened upon my post on daggys.  His black coffee was suddenly no longer quite as appealing.  

Well, consider yourself warned.  Today we are going to tackle the issue of Japanese plumbing.

It is safe to say that the Japanese are literally decades if not centuries ahead of the US when it comes to the sophistication of toilet tech.  The toilets are a marvel.  First, the seats are contoured, comfortable, and heated - so it may not be uncommon in drafty apartments to find your spouse hunkered down on the lav as a way to keep warm.  I'm not saying that's happened.  I'm just ... not not saying it.

Second, the seats have an array of 'after-business' options best explained by the hieroglyphics below ...

There's the torpedo

or the tsunami

and the seats also allow for various levels of pressure.  You'll notice that this toilet was set to the lowest level, also known as "the American."

And finally, the all important stop button.

You could theoretically entertain yourself for quite a long time trying all the options.  If there were a mini fridge by the toilet, you would almost never have to leave.

I should parenthetically also note that if you are intending to take pictures of toilets in a foreign county for your blog, it is best to lock the door.

Over the course of our first few days in Tokyo, an odd thing happened in our hotel bathroom.  The three women in my life all experienced existential crises in deciding whether to "take the plunge" and hit torpedo or go full tsunami and I often heard them gathered in the bathroom debating about who should go first and how hot the water might be and how big a difference pressure level 2 was from pressure level 1.  From what I understood, they all seemed troubled by the possibility that the water jet might be strong enough to eject them from the toilet and pin them against the far wall.  My best advice to them was to relax and accept what comes.  However, I drew the line at sitting down and taking a tsunami for the team for no reason.  I'm not a show pony dammit.  They could just wait a while.

Tessa is the only one who had good reason to be scared ...

Flashback to 2016

Tessa's first experience with a bidet was traumatic.  

The first thing to keep in mind is that Tessa is a button pusher.  If she sees a colorful button under a flashing light, she is guaranteed going to push that button at least four times.  If she happens to beat you into an elevator, you're hitting every floor from 1 to 10.  This tendency has changed over the years, as she now tends to push psychological buttons.  But it still holds.  

Tessa's traumatic event occurred our first night in Tokyo, when we ventured out of our hotel room and enticed the girls into a random restaurant around the corner.  To our eyes, it looked like an authentic Japanese udon restaurant - dim lighting, low seating, and everything written and spoken in a language we could not understand.  After sitting still for fifteen seconds, Tessa announced she had to use the bathroom and off she went.  This was not unusual, as Tessa has long attempted to spend most family dinners in the bathroom.

After a long time, Amy looked at me skeptically and said "Tessa's been gone a long time."

"Uh huh," I said, tapping a noodle with a chopstick to ensure it was, in fact, a noodle.

"I'm going to check on her."

Three minutes later, Amy returned with a bedraggled and wet Tessa.

The story goes like this.

Tessa handled the first several steps like a champ.  Find the bathroom.  Check.  Lock the door.  Check.  Sit on the potty.  Check.  Business.  Check.  But here is where it all went south.  Because buttons.  Tessa noticed that the toilet seat had many buttons with strange curved symbols.  So she selected one at random and pushed it.  

What followed was only described by a hysterical six year old, so I can't vouch for the accuracy of it all.  But my guess is that Tessa hit the tsunami button.  A massive stream of water struck her butt with the force of a hot tub jet.  She yelped and followed her instincts - which were to leap off the potty!  This might serve you well in some contexts, but in the bidet context it's a rookie mistake.  The water keeps coming.  So when Tessa leapt off the potty, water sprayed all over the bathroom - the mirror, the wall, the ceiling, the door, and Tessa.  Tessa's solution (and probably the only solution) was to sit back down on the potty.  But, as bidet pros know, this does not stop the tsunami.  The water kept spraying her butt and, every time she attempted to get up, the tsunami soaked the bathroom.  So Tessa was trapped.  For three minutes, she squirmed and shimmied and gyrated, seeking relief from the water cannon and promising that she would do anything (even sitting through family dinners) if she could just get off that potty.

When Amy finally got the door open, she said that the bathroom looked like the interior of a car wash.  

First day

Because we forced ourselves to stay awake until 8:30, we all had a great night's sleep.  And by great night, I mean that Tessa and I woke up at 4:45 and played Phase 10 until the sun rose.  This is a shot out our window towards Daiba, at the southern end of Tokyo.

After Amy and Lily woke up, we headed downstairs for our desperately needed breakfast and tried not to cause any trouble.  I practiced my two Japanese phrases (konnichiwa and arigato goziamasu) on everyone I met with the singleminded intensity of Rain Man.  

We wanted to travel into downtown Tokyo, but quickly discovered that you need cash in order to buy a subway ticket.  As you might remember, we were still on a credit union blacklist.  So we resigned ourselves to seeing the sights and walking around Daiba.  Walking might have been an overstatement.  People we passed would probably have described us as 'staggering' or 'shambling' and might have looked around for film crews thinking we were part of The Living Dead: Tokyo Dayz.

This is Fuji Television Broadcast Center, where they could film Tokyo Dayz: A gripping drama about a mild mannered forensic psychologist caught in the midst of a zombie apocalypse far from home.

Lady Liberty's sister.  The French really got around in the 1800s.

The Flame of Liberty, though Uncle Drew had a few NSFW captions for it.

There are vast underground labyrinths of these bubble machines, each of which will dispense an orb for the low cost of 300 yen.  Each orb contains a plastic Japanese artifact that is neither  necessary nor sufficient but still strangely addictive.  Because you're always left wondering ... what's in that next orb?

Dad, can I have another 300 yen?!

Tessa hoping for the Kiwi!

Airport '77?

Kudos to anyone who knows what I'm talking about.

Though maybe those aren't the kind of kudos you want.

Gundam Unicorn!

See you tomorrow!

And we are off ...

 At 1:30 am on the 2nd of January, we woke up (or perhaps more accurately briefly regained enough consciousness to rouse our children) and dragged our suitcases to the front while Murphy did his best impression of an NFL offensive lineman trying to protect the door.  He has this intuitive sense for the illegal chop block.  At some point in that transition, I managed to break my only belt and spent fifteen minutes blearily trying to put it back together while Amy hissed "are you still messing around with that damn belt?  For the love of God, either suck it in or grab some duct tape to hold your pants up."

Then we had to say goodbye to Murph.  From his expression, I thought he seemed to understand that we would not be "right back."

Our driver arrived and we set off.  Five minutes out, I realized with a chill that I'd forgotten something important.  Not my passport.  Not my credit cards.  My reading glasses.  As sad as it is, at fifty-two, reading glasses represent one of the most crucial survival mechanisms for a twenty two hour transit.  Not to mention a four month sentence with your family.

Made it through baggage without issue.  We all look pretty happy in this shot, though Amy does look like she's bracing herself for a dose of ECT.  I asked her if she wanted me to retake this shot because her eyes were closed.  She said "That was on purpose.  I was  pretending we were either already there or that you were sitting several rows behind us."

Our five hour layover in Detroit was spent trying to remember why we wanted to be in close proximity to each other for four months.  That three bedroom closet was beginning to seem awfully small in my mind.  Unfortunately, our family deals with sleep deprivation in different and mutually exclusive ways.  Lily does her best impression of a surly zombie who blames Tessa for everything.  Tessa does her best impression of a chipmunk on cocaine.  I do my best impression of a single guy sitting next to a crazy family.

Finally in our seats ....

Amy asking 'was this a mistake?' for the fifth time.  

Tessa saying "mistake?!  I knew it.  You guys don't have any idea what you're doing, do you?"

Me saying "Wait just a second.  I'm in the wrong seat.  I got that last second upgrade to business class."

Lily reading.

Fourteen hours seems like a long time until you are into your third hour (and fourth craft IPA) and your wife leans over and grips your forearm in a death grip and says "your daughter is driving me insane," when it seems like a really really long time and a really really bad idea.  That's when you go to the back of the plane and tell the steward that you need two glasses of chardonnay and any other central nervous system depressants they might have on hand.  You should use words like 'stat' or 'did you see the lady in 44E?'

Over the course of that fourteen years (not a typo, that's how long it felt) ...

Lily watched the Meg and Jaws (for the fifth time).  This from the girl who told us that she's really afraid of sharks while flying over the Pacific.

Tessa selected Cinderella, Clueless, Legally Blonde.

Amy went high brow and watched Emma and another Brit drama she can't remember.

I went full dystopian.  I watched Matrix 4, Parasite, and Nope.

You can see why family movie night is like electing a speaker to the House.

None of us took any pictures the rest of our trip.  What I remember through the haze of fatigue is that we disembarked to find scores of airport employees trying to hand out pink pamphlets that I initially mistook for an invitation to a religious service involving Kool-aid or an ad for a great deal on crypto (FTX FTW!).  It turned out that they were essential documents that certified we had been vaccinated.  Despite that, immigration and customs were a breeze.

What was not a breeze?  Currency.  We quickly learned that Japan is largely a cash based society and we brought zero yen.  No problemo!  Before we left we ascertained that we did in fact remember our ATM pin #s.  However, after ten failed withdrawal attempts and a finger bruised from jabbing the English button on the screen, I developed a sneaking suspicion that a) credit union ATM cards do not work in Japan, or b) I was trying to withdraw money from a slot machine.  The truth was even sadder.  In an effort to protect us, our credit union determined that we were North Korean hackers and put a freeze on our account.  

Prevent Fraud!  Choose Dirigo.

But first, a word from our censors

 

It has been a long lapse between posts, so let me explain.  As I wrote years ago (before our second trip to Australia), my writing is now constrained by the need to consider other people's feelings.  The best word for it is 'suffocating.'  I mean, if Stephen King had to think about the feelings of St. Bernard owners, Cujo never would have been written.  But it turns out that good fathers (and even pretty marginal fathers) must consider the feelings of their daughters.  It also turns out that 13 year olds have much stronger preferences than 6 year olds when it comes to information sharing.  They have demanded veto power over every blog post.  

Here is an example of a redacted blog post that was recently approved.

Today                    Tessa and Lily             Lily                     great                      kids                     ]                                      But then Amy and I                                                  and I admitted I                  was a                                          horrible                               father 

Both Lily and Tessa have that intuitive sense of dictatorial suppression that you only see in dystopian sci fi villains or the Kremlin.  I imagine the KGB agents reading my blog (I've heard I'm really big over in the Kremlin) would nod with grudging approval and admiration and yet, at some point, even veteran agents would eventually say with some level of exasperation "but if you block everything out then it isn't funny."  

To which Amy would say, "it's much better this way."

So here's what I'm thinking.  The blog will be an in-vivo experiment of free speech.  Freeish speech.  Now I’m not saying that it will devolve into a “nightmarish hell scape” though that is ironically how my daughters describe our conversations over family dinner.  It will essentially be historical fiction - a blog about a fictitious family of four fumbling their way through Japan.  Even so, I recognize that my daughter Tessa may read it someday and suspect that the character ‘Tessa’ is loosely based on her.  I totally get why she would think that.  My response is that I’ve tried to capture my perspective throughout my life.  Given the way my mind works, everything I write is infused with hyperbole and therefore only very loosely based in reality.  I'm sure colleagues reading this will mutter something about late onset schizophrenia or early onset dementia or an as yet unnamed personality disorder.  

This picture is proof.

Konnichiwa!

This unfortunately represents the sum total of my working Japanese, which is a real problem because Amy received a Fulbright to conduct eyewitness research in Japan in the spring.  When Amy originally approached me about spending four months in Japan, it seemed like the kind of situation in a marriage where you can get a great deal of credit for being flexible without much in the way of costs because your partner is almost certainly not going to get the grant.  I always look forward to questions like “can I apply for a grant to spend the winter volunteering to count caribou in the North Dakota badlands?”  Absolutely.  In fact, let’s apply for a year!  I suggest you be on the lookout for these opportunities in your own marriages.

But you should know that every so often it comes back to bite you.  Your partner gets that grant.  Then you have to suck it up and download a language app that proves you’re less smart than you thought you were.

The ostensible purpose of Fulbright is to send reasonable Americans to foreign places as ambassadors of goodwill.  They sent the Douglasses.  

Read those last two lines aloud.  If that isn’t already the preview voiceover for a B horror movie, it should be.  But I suspect we are talking about a new genre here.  Documentary Horror.  You know, something that would make people say ‘I know it’s real because it’s a documentary but … there is NO WAY that’s real’ and ‘it’s just really hard to watch.’  A mild mannered, self-effacing forensic psychologist trapped between two thirteen year olds watching reruns of My Little Pony on a fourteen hour flight.

In Japan, we are renting a “cozy” three bedroom closet.  In such an intimate space, I’m concerned that our family dynamic (which you could call feisty or explosive depending on how close you are sitting to us) will not mesh well with the more contemplative Japanese culture.  I usually think this when Tessa and Lily are shrieking at each other over who used up the last of the acne medication or, sometimes, who looked at whom in a certain way.  So I’ve spent the last month hissing “pretend we’re in an apartment” or “pretend we’re a different family.”  That’s what I do.

Lily continues to vie against Amy for top perfectionist in the family, and she will routinely hyperventilate at the prospect of getting second in anything.  In an effort to teach Lily that failure is invaluable as a learning experience, we mandated that she enter a state wide fiction writing contest for ages 10 to 18.  I told Amy there’s nothing like a cold, two line rejection letter to help you realize that the best bet for your writing career is Christmas letters.  Well, Lily won the damn thing and is now the sole professional author of the family.  Her story was, as Stephen King is thought to have said, too scary to read aloud.  I’m not certain what her next story is about, but the other day she did say to me ‘Dad, I’d be really sad if you were murdered.’  If you dare to read her story, it’s at the Telling Room website.  

In addition to her writing, Lily has been working on her awareness of environmental issues.  This fall, she asked for a glass of milk and I finished one carton and opened another one.  As I was about to pour the milk into her glass, she shouted “STOP!”  When I asked for clarification, she said “if you use different cartons … the milk will be from different cows.”  Feeling a surge of guilt about my inadequate education on industrial dairy farming, I demanded “did you seriously think they would just milk each cow directly into the carton?”  It turns out that she did.  When I proceeded to explain that every milk carton contains milk from many different cows, she gagged and swore off all dairy.  I have neglected to explain the same is true for yogurt, cream, ice cream, etc.

I’m sure many of you are concerned about Tessa’s medical condition (the acute crushinitis I mentioned in last year’s letter).  It became manifest in the form of a towering and monosyllabic thirteen year old whose name rhymes with Panthony.  I remember last year when Tessa was railing against our draconian moratorium on dating.  Her exact quote was “all my problems would be solved if I could just date.”  I’m not proud that I said “Tess, that’s when your problems will start.”  Now, I’m not saying I’m prophetic or about to start a religion, but I do think Tess has been surprised that the lifting of the moratorium did not coincide with a stampede of suitors.  Let’s just say that Panthony is slow playing the courtship.

In addition to crushes, Tessa has continued her pursuit of dominance of soccer, racquet sports, and a game I call “we just want dad to lose.”  We play it every time we play a card game or a board game or a sport or talk about our goals in life.

My family has started to say outrageous things to “make the Christmas letter.”  I keep having to say, ‘I’m not a shill’ and ‘this isn’t propaganda’ and ‘the letter is about how I feel about real things.’  Tess will usually respond by asking “are you going to describe my hair as honey blond or ash blond?”  Lily usually doesn’t say anything because she’s reading.

As we frantically check things off our lists, I’m realizing that I need to learn a few other important phrases in Japanese.  Most travelers would want to know how to say “where is the bathroom?” or “is that a noodle or a tentacle?” but I suspect I will need some specialized language, such as “we need to hire a juvenile defense attorney,” “that is too much money,” and “what are the detention center visiting hours?”

I just discovered an old draft blog post from our first time in Tokyo.  I'm posting it now for context.

Imagine being in a new city.

Now, imagine that you have suffered a debilitating stroke and, as a result, you tend to wander to the left.  Oh, also, you can't read.

Now, imagine that you've also suffered a gun shot wound to the leg, resulting in massive blood loss that impairs thinking and mobility.

Now, imagine that there is a mosquito with an American accent constantly buzzing in your ear telling you that they've done nothing interesting AT ALL since coming to Tokyo and they just want to go back to LEWISTON where there are PLAYGROUNDS and THINGS THAT ARE INTERESTING TO DO.  (As an aside, I often find myself fantasizing about two simple things: locks and yards).

This is what it is like to be in Tokyo with six year olds.

Yes, I know, most of you are thinking "Shut the hell up you unemployed forty something Game of Thrones loving psychologist."  Fine, say that.  Just don't tell me what happened in the first two episodes.  Still, I would continue to advocate for an "extreme reality television event" that involved traveling around the world with our children.  Participants of the The Amazing Race would piss themselves.

I should also send a shout out (also known as a CONSTANT SCREAM OF DESPAIR AND HATRED) to Jetstar, which, despite their best efforts, got us here safely.  If you ever have a chance to travel via Jetstar - don't.  It's hard to imagine where to start, but I'll start with the innocuous sounding "baggage allowance."  After you Google 7 kg, try to fit that into your carry-on luggage, remembering that you have to pack snacks, books, and toys for the six year old set.  It is impossible.  Amy and I spent a ridiculous amount of time weighing our backpacks and carry-on luggage in a fruitless attempt to get down to 7kg.

That was the best part of flying Jetstar.  The worst is that they require you to gather all of your baggage after the domestic leg of the flight and cart it to the international counter - WHICH DOESN'T open until 3 hours before your flight.  Which, thanks to our overly conservative travel agent, was three and a half hours away.  At such times, you learn to really nurse a pint of Guinness so you can have a barstool.

As for flying ... I learned something very important which I will pass on to you now for free.  If you ever ... EVER have the good fortune to have a flight with two empty seats next to you - IMMEDIATELY move into the center seat and take up as much room as you can.   If you don't do this, it is very likely that a hipster wanna be in his forties from Australia will promptly move up several seats and immediately lay out on both empty seats, ass pointed towards you.  When this happened, I felt a wave of deep self-loathing for not having the wherewithal to claim the seats myself.  In retaliation, I made a LOT of noise opening my Jetstar Spinach Ravioli and laughed a LOT while watching the Revenant.  That DiCaprio does crack me up.

Still, the hipster slept through it all.  I considered taking a picture but I frankly felt bad for my camera.

And then there was Tokyo.  Ah, Tokyo.

Our hotel had two rooms for us but no adjoining door.  Amy and I had a plan that involved putting the girls in one room and being able to talk to each other in the adjoining room.  Adjoining is really the key word.  Our travel agent apparently believes that adjacent is a synonym to adjoining.  Although, similar, they are not synonyms.  So instead, I'm drinking a glass of a $3 bottle of sauvingnon blanc purchased at a 7-Eleven in the dark while Lily snores.  This is not how I envisioned experiencing Tokyo.  However, the $3 bottle of wine is really quite good.

Our girls were troopers the first night.  Tessa helped us navigate the largest city in Japan with an unerring sense of direction.  She was like Amy's seeing-eye dog.  Both kids tried food at an Udon restaurant which Amy and I loved.  The second night, they demanded Subway.  In a city of 88,000 restaurants, Lily and Tessa ate Subway sandwiches with lettuce, tomato, and mayo.  

There is no word in Japanese to describe my feeling of sadness.

 In a pro-blogger move (or maybe an amateur blogger but pro ADHDer) I'm going to put up a post I wrote a few years ago and recycling our 2022 Christmas letter.  Look at that.  Three posts the first day!

Signage Part 2

This was posted right by a picnic area that was deserted.

I think calling a brown snake "shy" sort of misses the point.

Naked lights?  I've been missing out.

Um, no.  This does not work.























Neither does this.

Where did you get Hepatitis C?

Captain Snag and the Weinerbago food truck?

When I suggested that Tessa stand by this sign, she managed to look simultaneously offended and embarrassed by me.  I'm pretty sure that defines the teenage set.  Regardless, she couldn't argue with the logic.  Frozen kids probably don't smell like much of anything.

What can you say about this?

Stairs!  Woot!

Ride the lightening!

















This gave me a chill.  What is up with that threat about being in paradise with these over medicated people I've never met?

And a free public event involving paradise and eternal happiness?  That is just going to piss off Ticketmaster.  I wouldn't be surprised if they barred supreme beings from using their stadiums.  If Pearl Jam couldn't beat them in the 90s ...















Hmmmm.  A lot of smiling going on here.

The influencers sounds like a better name for a rock band or a B horror movie, though perhaps services here strive to combine both elements.

Like so much in Australia, this sign seemed friendly from far away.  It's only when you get closer that you realize you've been threatened the whole time.

And now for the lavatory section of the blog.

  

A testament to the possibility that people are not smart and/or are overly hopeful.  Yet, in a universe as uncertain as ours, how can we really be sure that removing the sign won't make it work?  And isn't "work" a relative term?  If someone ignores the sign and uses the toilet, isn't it fair to say that the toilet "worked" for them?

The Crouchers Strike Back.

I can hear them now.  "Oy.  Don't like me crouching over the toilet, eh?  I'll skip it altogether.  Never trusted it anyway."

In all fairness, I think we should consider the possibility that the "incident" that must have precipitated the sign's creation may not have been an expression of scatalogical defiance.  As a father of twins, I'm something of an expert in how to put down a scatalogical rebellion.  It requires a ruthless hand and absolutely no sense of smell.  I won't subject you to the details, but lets just say it involved a loose diaper, a cream colored carpet, and an hour of "drying time."

So perhaps the culprit wasn't intending it as a statement.  Perhaps the "inevitable" occurred prematurely, sometime between dropping trow and planting cheek.  You'd probably have to get a forensic expert in there to examine the scattershot pattern and it wouldn't be pretty, but it could exonerate the crouchers.

After reading the sign, your immediate impulse is to look down.  Not a good impulse.  Better just not to know.  You get through moments like this by focusing on the possibility that the figure was doing yoga.