Circus LA: Novelty

NINJA!!!!!!!!!!

Traveling is a novel experience> every day brings me in to contact with exciting and brand new things. Meeting new people, eating different food, speaking a new language. Over the last few days I have been thinking about how ridiculously ethnocentric I am. I have come in to this country armed with basically one word: Arigato, thankyou. Somehow, thanks to the kindness of the people here in Tokyo and with a whole lot of pointing, I have got through. Tonight L and I realised that in some sense, we are probably a bit of a novelty as well. We went out to dinner in Shibuya at a Standing Sushi Bar. We have been getting pretty used to being the only caucasians but realised we were totally out of our depth as the menu was written on the wall in japanese text. After standing for a few minutes with our eyes wide and confused one of the Chefs brought us a menu in English. He was so hilarious and found it quite amusing that we didn't speak much Japanese. After a few minutes the chef, the couple next to us, L and I were all laughing at how hopeless we were! The couple poured us some powdered green tea and L & I chose sushi off of the english menu by pointing and saying arigato lots of times. We had raw salmon, prawns, avocado, some cooked salmon and cucumber rolls. All of it was made right in front of us using the hand pressed rice method. Delicious!

After that we went and sat in the Starbucks above the famous Shibuya scramble crossing, we were so amazed at the number of people who were still out and about at 11:30 pm on a Tuesday. We were also amazed when it came time to go home at how many people were on the train line. On the Sobu train the people sitting next to us said hello and Lauren and I again realised that we were a bit of a novelty. In Adelaide we are so used to seeing a multitude of nationalities (even if they are all driven to assimilate with our culture or else face eviction). Here in Tokyo I stick out like a sore thumb. Not to say that there aren't many caucasians, its just more that there are a fairly low ratio and mostly concentrated at tourist hot spots.

When we changed trains to get back to Asakusabashi there were at least 250 people waiting for the same train which was basically full when it arrived. We waited for the next train but within a few minutes the crowd had swollen to the same size again. AHH! at least we only had to go one stop. Now we are back at our novelty hostel Khaosan Tokyo NINJA getting ready for a good nights sleep in our novelty capsule beds!

scramble crossing, Shibuya

Midnight JR train

Other novel experiences from the past few days:

tasting new things: I read an article in Nylon about the guy from Of Montreal who said that while he was in Osaka for a show he tried Octopus balls and they were great. I mentioned it to L and so we decided to give it a go. Most of the time its good to try things once.