A Few Thoughts on Tokyo

A few thoughts on Tokyo:

- It's the loudest, quietest city I've ever been to. It feels like every corner in the city is Times Square. There are massive, bright billboards everywhere, cars flying by, thousands of peope everywhere you look, and yet it's all eerily quiet: people speak in hushed tones, no one honks their horn, and it almost seems as if the cars themselves run quieter than in America: they hum, rather than roar past you. It's equally cool and spooky.

- Restaurant doors. This is really weird: pretty much all restaurants have some sort of covering outside their front door, which makes it impossible to see in and immensely difficult to choose a place. Is it crowded? Empty? Do they have a bar? WHAT DO YOU HAVE TO HIDE???

- Not surprisingly, most of the travelling that Lauren and I do is based on one thing: food. I like to spend hours researching the perfect bowl of ramen or finding the ideal izakaya. Not so here: forget about trying to find that one place you're looking for. There are far too many streets, backalleys, and strange addresses to make any of that possible. Even if you did find the place you were looking for, chances are their sign wouldn't be in English. Simply trying a place sight unseen (and ofter, per the above, sight *really* unseen) took a major leap of faith for us (me). That said, we were never disappointed: while nothing truely knocked our socks off, everything we had was uniformally delicous.

- Tokyo projects success. This is sort of difficult to explain, but there's something about Tokyo that just seems to be a step ahead of anywhere else I've been. There are loads of people, but they're all well dressed, polite, and busy looking. The city is impossibly clean. There's virtually no illiteracy (I'm told). I didn't see a single homeless person (or even a poor-looking person) our entire time there. I'm not so naive as to think that there isn't poverty somewhere in the city (maybe, as in Paris, it's on the outskirts?), and Lauren points out that Japan apparently has the highest suicide rate in the world, but the folks here are clearly on to something. It's the first place I've been to that made New York seem vaguely behind the times.

- Similar to the above, but there is some serious wealth going on in this city. Being a car guy, when I go to a foreign country I'm always interested in checking out the local automobile situation. Tokyo was insane: in our first half day there I saw three Rolls Royce Phantoms, which are, like, really expensive. In NY I probably see that many in a year. Ferraris, Lamborghinis, and Mazeratis are everywhere. Crazy.