Today is a pretty lazy day. Echo makes breakfast...hold that...more like lunch, as we watch sumo on TV. Today is the next to last day of the huge New Year's Tournament. Lester calls, talks to Echo for a while in Japanese, then tells me not to tell her, but there is a skunk wandering around outside his house, and that he is drunker than the skunk. I find this intensely humorous and have a hard time keeping a straight face while on the phone with him. He tells us that we should go to some Convention Center..."it looks just like The Empire Strikes Back, so I call it the Star Wars Building." He can't tell us exactly where it is, or what it is called, but he tells us which train station to get off at. We leave, and by the time we take the train to the subway we think will take us there, it is getting dark and snowing...I guess we got up pretty late! Since Lester hadn't been able to tell us where it was or what it was called, we have a heck of a time finding the place in a blizzard. Echo would just walk along in step about two inches behind me with her head buried in my back, urging me to continue on into the falling snow. It turns out the building is the "Tokyo International Forum," not the convention center, but we will forgive Lester his drunkenness. The building is amazing, a sixty-meter-high glass atrium, somewhat ship-shaped when viewed from the outside, with a zigzagging suspended walkway across the inside of the building very high above the floor. It is a very new, and apparently critically-acclaimed structure. Hopefully the pictures will turn out. There isn't much to do inside if you aren't attending a meeting there, but walking across the walkway is excitement enough, given the height.
Echo captures proof that I was there
Well, maybe next time I will take other than a point-and-shoot. Glass ceiling, walls, and suspened walkway.
Daytime photo from their brochure.
Daytime photo of the ceiling taken from indoors.
As we leave the snow is still very wet and driving, and I am getting wet and cold. We take the train to Shinjuku-Takashimaya Times Square for dinner. I just have to try Japanese Mexican food, as part of my ongoing quest to sample regional variants of "Mexican" everywhere...and it is actually pretty good! We have to wait a long time in line as there were probably twenty people in line in front of us just to get their names down to be seated eventually. In line it is cool to see like six or eight other gaijin in one place in one night...I can't help but feel a real connection to other foreigners. Echo keeps buying me drinks, insisting that I get drunk. I have four monster-huge margaritas, raspberry, pineapple, and two o-ren-ji. I am a bit tipsy, especially as I get up to go to the men's room. I still have no idea why attached women seem to want to get me drunk, but it keeps happening to me...curious. We sure laugh a lot on the way home for having just dropped ninety bucks on dinner. Probably the funniest crowded subway ride I have had to date. There is a video store near the Yono train station, so we rent some videos and trudge home in the snow. We watch "Mickey Blue Eyes" and go to bed.
