Hospitality

The best part of living abroad is that you get visitors. The best part of living 6,000 miles away is that the visitors stay for a good chunk of time. In this time they get to discover Tokyo, Chloe and Tessa get to discover them, and we get to discover this truly immense seemingly unknowable city through diverse perspectives, and sometimes we get to discover dancing till 4am in Tokyo while they babysit our sleeping beauties. We may be old but we can still rock the dance floor :) Well, at least we think we are rocking.

Most cities make you work to find all the little gems they possess, let alone to merely experience the city in its true urban form. Tokyo takes this cardiovascular aspect to the sightseeing up a notch -- or twenty. The city is dotted with taxis but they are expensive and usually take twice as long to reach a destination than public transport and good old-fashioned walking. Like millions of others (no joke, Tokyo has a population of 12 million and greater Tokyo, 35 million), we therefore find ourselves taking trains everywhere we want to go, which sounds straightforward enough. The tiring part is that the trains are crowded (read: no seats!), you usually have to transfer (read: tons of stairs!), you usually have to walk to wherever you're going once exiting the labyrinthine train stations (read: more effing stairs!), you usually get lost and you are usually carrying a baby or two. Oh wait, maybe that's just us. No wonder the Japanese are so slim (or "smartu" as they say here). And, since everyone from the six-year old girl traveling home from school alone to the elderly guy with a cane to the women wearing high heels (women do not do the sneakers until they reach the office thing here) and everyone in between is climbing the damned stairs, well you can't complain. Or maybe you can complain but just not to a Japanese person. Nick's dad now refers to chez nous as "the clinic" as you're sure to get your exercise and hopefully a little motivation while you're at it.

The first time you try to locate an address in Tokyo you feel as though you just slid down the bunny hole. Numbers do not follow a consecutive order, streets don't have names, and you can often be standing 100 meters (yes, meters) away from the place you are looking for and even the nice Japanese person with the misfortune of being asked to help won't know how to find it. God bless Google Maps. God bless the Japanese also for being so gracious about giving directions. Here's an example. After studying the map provided by the restaurant's website before leaving the house, google-mapping it at home, google-mapping it again on my phone, google-mapping it a third time on Nick's phone and still getting lost (wtf?) I ask a woman for help. She proceeds to study the map then asks my permission (seriously) to call the restaurant. She spends five minutes discussing the restaurant's location with the restaurant, thanks the restaurant about ten times before hanging up then tells us it is down the road on the right. Unbelievable. Another person who inadvertently became our temporary tour guide looked up the address on his own phone then proceeded to walk us all the way to the store. Talk about hospitality. In exchange I let him take my picture. He asked. He also took Nick's dad's picture. Strange indeed. I've never experienced a culture where people were so hospitable about helping out complete strangers. I guess the Japanese like to have visitors too.

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