9/3/2001

3:15pm Cafe de F.O.B. Tokyo
I got lost. All by myself, outside the museum that supposedly houses woodblock prints. Our group was split up, and, luckily, we established a 3:45 meeting place. I'm just waiting to go. I'm the only gaijin here- I pointed to order what turned out to be a delicious banana (or baname) smoothie. People are staring at me. It doesn't help that I'm soaking wet from the rain. Actually, I'm starting to get the feeling that I've sat here too long. But one story first: going to the bank to change money. We walked into a bank. No words were in romanji. People took tickets and sat down. But where did they get them? Finally a Japanese woman pointed them out. I took one and waited. Then I saw a counter with the exchange rate. I walked over, checks and passport in hand. A man rushed over to the counter waving his hands across his chest. That meant they don't change money. It was frustrating.

So we walked several blocks (about 20 minutes) and found an international office of some sort that, aside from providing international documents, changed my travelers checks into Yen. Horray! or, rather, Saikoh!

9:45pm Scruffy Murphy's
Yes- an Irish pub in Tokyo.To top it all off, there's a live jazz band playing "Summertime". They're really good. It's a keyboard, bass and drum player. The drum player is singing in English! When the 5 of us walked in he announced that he was going to play some music for us. This is an unexpected piece of home in such a far away place. We keep clapping after the songs, but no one else is. I hope we're not contributing to any stereotypes. Then again, we've all started writing in our journals now so I'm sure we look unusual.

The drummer's name is Charlie. I didn't catch who the other two were. New subject- we met new friends today. In Asakusa some other people we were with met Isabel and Yugo. Yugo is from Japan and ate dinner with us. Isabel is visiting Yugo and lives in Taiwan. After dinner (which was fun because we finally learned the correct way to order and eat) Greg and I spoke at length with Yugo. She was very interested in us and our funny stories of mistakes made in Japan. Her English got better the longer she spoke with us. She eventually became very comfortable and shared some jokes with us. On the subway Isabel gave us all some chocolate covered Chinese noodles. They were delicious. I took out my unwrapped quarters and explained collecting them. Isabel was thankful but Yugo looked like she was going to cry. Now I think I did something bad because she did not have a gift for us. Although, she showed us around and that was a great service. When they left us a bit later I almost cried. In only a few hours we became so close. She told me that there are lots of questions she has there are lots of things she wants to talk about but time was too short. Today I learned both the scholarly definition of Ichigo Ichie, and the emotional one.