Delivery truck delivery truck

And back

Transportation hack for those who have mildly injured themselves on vacation and/or brought back too many bags: the Airport Limousine costs about the same as the Narita Express and is just a few steps from baggage claim. It takes a little longer to get to Shinjuku Station. This, to me, is compensated for by the fact that it requires about a half mile less walking and zero stairs.

Taking the bus also lets you step outside and get acclimated to the soupy summer air that is always tinged with burning field scraps near the airport. Nothing smells more like Japan to me than that smell.

UPDATE for Jimmy: Here is a sample of two other routes you could take, depending on the time you go. All the time and price info is there. (Use this English train route-finder to find what's available at the time you're coming in - enter from Narita to Shinjuku and your own date and time.)

How did she guess

I asked my neighbor to water our tomato and basil plants while we are on the west coast for the next week. She looked excited and asked the obvious question.
"Are you going back for Michael Jackson's funeral?!"

Bones about it

What is not to love about an exhibit that greets you with an ostrich skeleton and a chatty skull? The ostrich skeleton is real, and the human skull is even better: it was based on images of show director Shunji Yamanaka's skull and then made with a 3-D printer.


I suggest you go see bones at 21_21 Design Sight gallery in Roppongi.

Beautiful black and white photos of animal skeletons are the jumping off point for x-rays and extractions of the "bones" of everyday and extraordinary industrial objects. The next leap is bigger - interactive industrial design projects exploring what skeletons could be. What does the skeleton of your shadow look like? What if the skeleton of a bench showed you where it felt your weight?

The biggest wow was the interactive guide explaining the exhibits in English and Japanese. On a plain white table, an ordinary loose piece of white paper responds to its orientation and your touch to display information about the things in the room. (Yeah, you kind of have to play with it to get it.) It was the closest thing I've seen to the virtual screens in Minority Report.

It's not a big show. You could see it all in 15 or 20 minutes if nothing reels you in. It may have helped that I went with no expectations. I was killing time in Roppongi and feeling contemplative and it was right there. The underground gallery was cool and dark and almost empty. Soothing, subtle music was playing and strange to say, the place even smelled calm. I stared for a long time at titanium knee and hip joints in glass cases and imaginary spider bones in a rock garden and undulating amoeba arms that looked squishy but were hard plastic.

On til Friday, August 30,　￥1000 general admission.　Behind Tokyo Midtown (access map).

Extreme exaggeration?

English label: "Extreme Balsamic Vinegar Taste"

Japanese label: "Contains no balsamic vinegar."

I love that the fancy bottle says "Pringles" on the side, like they're running a little boutique vinegar cellar on the side somewhere.

Not that we expected any natural ingredients to be harmed in the making of Pringles. Anyway, they're tasty. A lot less vinegary and more sour-creamy than you might expect.

A tale of two eels

Origin has two kinds of eel lunches, one big and one small. Which one costs almost twice as much as the other? The small one, of course, which uses eel from Japan instead of China.
Under the photo of the Chinese eel there is a disclaimer that it has been chosen carefully and inspected rigorously by the government's health department [because we know you think Chinese eel is scary and gross but really, we're only using the good kind not the icky ones you read about and look, it's cheaper and you get more of it!]. Yum.

Chinese eel was at the center of the most recent food labeling scandal, too,

The police said Nakamura bought eel grown and grilled in China for ¥340 per pack and sold them for about ¥600 after repackaging the fish to make them appear as if they had been grown in Kagoshima and other places in Japan.

so you have to wonder how much to believe any of it. This is a shame, because I really like unagi-don but now I can't help thinking there's a better than average chance that the yummy stuff over rice has an icky past. I mean, ickier than the fact that it's, you know, an eel.

Arts and crafts for fun and profit

You, too, can make ＄120 in your spare time with the Japanese government's stimulus plan.

You will need:
Japanese residency
pen
claim form
instruction sheet
photo copier
alien card or passport
bank card and branch info
scissors
glue (not staples, clips, or tape)

Supervision by Japanese speaker recommended.

Like I need help procastinating

Please do it later.

This may be the one I steal.

I feel like you are trying to tell me something

Just about every public bathroom I've been in here has an emergency call button. Does anyone really come when you call? They must, and there must be a problem with that in the ladies' room at Hibiya station because the word "emergency" is plastered eight times in two languages around the button. There are two other signs in the stall about it, too, warning about the inconvenience an errant push causes. Why the fuss? Probably because, as it often is, the button is right next to the flush button.

Thin air

I was enjoying looking down at clouds once when the flight attendent asked over the PA for medical personnel to come forward. A woman hurried to a slumped passenger and adjusted an oxygen mask on him. The pilot announced we were diverting to Kansas City. Looking down again, I felt every foot of the impossible distance between the plane and the ground, between the blue man and help. The plane was small, the distance was huge, and we all were flimsy.

I feel like I am on that plane when I am here and should be home.