"I'm Freaking Out"

"I'm freaking out!" These were my first words to Liv upon landing at Tokyo's Narita airport. Flying is always surreal. You take off in one place and land in a completely different place. But it's particularly odd to fly 10 hours over water and land in a place that for all of my life has seemed so far far away and so very different. And we didn't even have night, yet it's a day later. Try explaining that to an 8-year-old.

After smoothly clearing customs, we take a 1.5 hour bus ride into the city itself. I don't think I've ever seen so much industrialization in my life as I saw on that ride. Yet there were occasional glimpses of water--either ocean or river; occasional golf shooting ranges with their green netting overhead; and occasional architectural wonders. But as we neared the city proper, the industrial landscape gave way first to somewhat depressing apartment buildings before morphing into a true modern cityscape with beautiful glass towers everywhere. Our bus stops at two hotels before ours, and the bus company workers who load bags on and off at the stops gives a bow to the bus as we pull away!

Our hotel, the Villa Fontaine Shiodome, is a lovely high rise. We're happy with it, and it was a bargain. We rest up briefly and then head out for a walk to find food. We also hope to stave off jet lag by getting a little exercise and being outside in the daylight. Our destination is in the neighborhood just to the north of ours. It's an area called Ginza, which is famous for fancy shopping, but also has (we find) a continuous row of restaurants under the train tracks. It's a great use of space, and gives many of the restaurants an intriguing cave-like feel. But we're looking for a spot called Yakitori alley. Yakitori is grilled chicken skewers, and we've read that there's an alley where open-air restaurants offer the stuff in a very casual setting. The guidebook instructions are to find the smoke and follow it, but that nearly fails us until Scott takes a dive under the tracks and finds a crazy alley that leads us to where we can see the smoke. Success! The yakitori spot is quite busy, which we take as a good sign. We squeeze into the slanted roofed area in this tunnel/alley, joining a young Japanese couple at their table. It's smoky, colorful paper lanterns hang above, and it's just GREAT. We order chicken skewers as well as leeks, green peppers and eggplant, all on skewers. Tor and I adore the peppers, which are 5 individual whole peppers that are tiny: about two inches long and 1/2 inch wide. Yum.

Now it's 8:00 p.m. Japan time (4 a.m. in California). I think we'd better get some sleep!