Morning in Asakusa

It’s about 5:45AM; the morning sun is streaming through the window. We’ve been awake since around 3:30. Tracie just went down to the lobby to mail postcards. Through the open window I can hear crows and a few voices from the street, 19 floors below. Tokyo always seems quieter than I’d expect for a city of its size and at this time of the morning it’s almost still.

I realized yesterday or so that part of the challenge of blogging during this visit is that there’s a great deal about being here that I’ve assimilated and hence don’t feel any need to describe, particularly if I’ve decribed it already in entries for previous years. It’s not that it isn’t still exciting and still somewhat magical to be here; it’s just that in the past it was easy to write about things like vending machines and high-tech toilets because, well, it was all so new. Now it’s familiar and I’m left with one of the usual challenges of writing, which is to try to say something interesting about the familiar.

6:00AM: I can hear a large bell ringing slowly. I think it’s coming from the Sensoji Temple, which our room overlooks. It rings every morning at 6:00. One of these mornings I must go over there with a recorder in hand.

Yesterday we went to Tokyo Station to obtain our rail passes. In the past this has been a slight challenge because the station is both large and under rennovation and the location of the office at which one obtains rail passes has changed. This time, however, it turned out to be where it was last year, and we (we meaning Tracie) even remembered its location well enough to basically walk straight to it. The station turned out to have a new section of shops and sources of food, so we wandered through and gathered quite a bit of souvenirs for friends and relatives. (No, I’m not saying what they are. That would spoil the surprise.) I found for Tracie what’s the first contendor for the title of Most Bestest souvenir of the trip:

Yes, now she has her very own plushie shinkansen. You should have seen the look on her face when I held it up from across the store. She says that I should have seen the looks on the faces of the proprietors when they saw the look on her face, without knowing what it was that she was looking at. Yes, folks, the middle-aged blonde gaijin is simply beside herself with delight because her partner is waving a a stuffed train at her. Fortunately they were entirely happy to indulge us because we had already piled several hundred dollars’ worth of stuff on their counter.

Laden with shopping bags, we stopped at a small coffee shop for a brief rest. The menu was entirely in Japanese and the apologetic waitress apparently didn’t know either the terms “hot chocolate” or “cocoa”, so Tracie ended up with orange juice. My friend Dan once taught me how to order coffee in various forms with a Japanese inflection but of course that particular lesson didn’t spring to mind. Simply saying “coffee”, however, produced a cup of remarkably good coffee–strong in the European style but not bitter.

We returned to the hotel to deposit our bags and set out for the tea shop and the washi store in Asakusa, two of our favorite haunts. The area was quite packed with people, as you can see from my previous entry. We bought a bunch of stuff at the tea shop; one of the elderly proprietors actually giggled as Tracie handed stuff to him over the counter. There’s an interesting contrast of personalities at that particular store. There’s an elderly gentleman who I take to be the owner. He is quite reserved and, while polite and appreciative of business, is not as readily engaged as a somewhat younger employee. However, it is the elder proprietor who eventually presents us with a little tray bearing little porcelain cups full of steaming emerald-green tea.

Tracie is sure that the owner and operators of the washi shop now recognize her from previous visits. I suppose that she stands out from the steady stream of visitors because she’s 1) blonde, 2) polite, 3) shows far greater appreciation for Japanese paper than the average Western tourist. Whatever the case, it’s fun to recognize and be recognized by the people that run one of our favorite places here.

Tracie just returned from the lobby, laughing because the desk clerk didn’t particularly understand English and hence didn’t particularly understand why she asked for 25 stamps after handing him fewer than 25 postcards. Eventually she gave up, knowing that most of the people at the desk have a greater command of English and hence it would be simpler to get the extra stamps later in the day. Part of the adventure of visiting Japan without being able to speak Japanese is to recognize that there are situations in which it’s easier to gracefully accept that you’re not going to understand each other and let it go at that, and order orange juice instead of cocoa.