day two. sunday.

Everyone was up by about 5am, so I took a bath (very nice! more details on that later) and headed out to find the 7-11 to get breakfast basics. Easy to find, which was surprising because the taxi ride the night before made our neighborhood seem like an impossible combination of hills and turns and streets that are narrow enough to be one-way but turn out to manage two directions plus bikes and pedestrians (no sidewalks in this area). To be sure, the 7-11 is just two streets away. But later exploration of the neighborhood has been similar. Things seem a bit hard to follow, and they seem really far, on the map, but we've found it to be relatively manageable. The difficult thing is a lack of street names on most of the streets and the inability to read any street names that do exist--you can't match up characters of the alphabet like you can in foreign countries with a roman alphabet, at least not without spending 20 minutes trying to figure out whether this slight angle matches that slight angle, whether that's an important dot or just a piece of dirt, etc.

The weather here is perfect. 70s, not many clouds, a bit of a breeze always. Oddly, though, everyone is dressed like it's 30 below. As Kate and I were sweating in short sleeves, we actually saw someone in a friggin' PARKA. Most everyone seems to be wearing scarves or fur. We asked Y. about it (she was pretty overdressed also), and she just shrugged and said it was because they loved fashion so much. Forget rice and green tea, I think this might be the secret to why the Japanese are all so trim--they're sweating it out.

Archer was so tired that after his afternoon nap, nothing could wake him:

[[I told a complete bald-faced lie to Archer this morning and don't regret it at all. It was about 5am, he had been up since 2, and was kicking and singing in bed with me, completely unable to calm down, much less go to sleep. At one point he mentioned that he wanted mortadella. I told him that if he took a nap I'd get him some, even though there probably isn't mortadella to be seen in a 500 mile radius. It was worth it because even though he didn't sleep, he did sit quietly for about 10 minutes and I could relax without being kicked or having a finger in my ear.]]