Monday, January 29th, 2001
Today is supposed to be get-ready-to-head-for-Kansai day, but I am running out of time at home. I start out by reading and checking my email this morning. I go to buy a box at the post office to ship my Toyota books in. It takes a bit of finding, but actually isn't all that far from the train station. I get a box and a postage rate sheet. The whole time I have been hauling around my pack, full of absolutely all the clothes I brought with me to Japan (save the ones on my back.) I find the laundry right where Echo said it would be. Echo had tried to make me use her washing machine, but I didn't want to. She has overextended herself so far already that I don't feel comfortable using her washer and her phone, no matter what she says. It turns out that a Japanese "ko-een rondori" doesn't have detergent for sale the way American laundromats do. This is hard for me to understand for a moment...after all, I am in the land of vending machines! When I actually think about it, I am not sure where I was envisioning they would have it, after all the whole laundromat is comprised of a row of washers along one wall, and a two-foot walkway between the washer doors and the opposite wall. You can open the dryer door, but not while you are stading in front of it. Put the pack back on, strap it up, walk down the block to cross back over the street and head for the station-area store. I get a box of ten individual packets of detergent. "Single-serving detergent...single-serving friends...single-serving nation of Japan." Back at the laundry, I am alone until an older lady comes in. I stand to let her past, bowing like a bobbing drinking bird toy and excusing myself all over the place (as is appropriate in Japan.) She grabbed someone else's abandoned empty laundry basket and shoves it in my face, wavig it all over and carrying on very excitedly in Japanese at a million miles an hour. I venture a guess that she may be offering it to me if I need to use it, but this is a good time to pull out Lester's old reliable "Ah sumimasen. Nihongo nomimasen!" Literally, "There is no excuse. I don't drink Japanese." Hehehe!

Laundry done, I return home and try to collect and organize all of the shiznit I had scattered. Somehow with a big backpack and a small messenger bag, it doesn't matter how carefully you plan and pack, as soon as you are rolling on the bus, the thing you need is underneath in the big pack, and when you get to your destination, you have to unpack completely, because it is on the bottom! Luke always reminds me of this fact, but I continue to cling to the hope that I may get right someday. (I guess the trip where I don't need to unpack will be the first trip where I first overpack, eh?) On to the phone call phase of planning. I get ahold of Josh Berg, who is friendly, but suitably vague about everything else. Onoe-san is on a mobile pone, and we might be able to work around any language difficulty if I could hear him. Instead I get khhhhk... wheee er KHK mmmfff KHK fffff KHK...blip......blurp... I finally just say taht I will call him later about five times, hope that he could hear at least one of them, and hang up. I make a reservation at the Nagoya Youth Hostel and try to make a reservation at the Toyota factory for a factory tour, but they had just closed for the day. I sit down and write for a long time, and then am opening the door to leave on an evening stroll when Echo gets home. She is very disappoionted that I am leaving, so I promise to make it short. I was so starved I grabbed some sushi down at the corner and went over and sat on a *cold* metal staircase for a pedestrian staircase and scarfed it. My walk is over twenty minutes later...so much for exercise...and I am back to find Echo with Pizza Hut pizza she had ordered and another movie! It is hard to tell Echo no because she is trying so hard to please me. Don't worry, despite the way it sounds, it was a cultural experience: the Japanese put some wierd s**t on their pizzas. Try shrimp and kimuchi (Korean hot peppers.) I don't eat much, and think that watching American movies with Japanese subtitles is...well, it isn't a waste of time anyway...it is helping some with my kanji recognition skills. We watched "Een-sah-ee-dah" The Insider, which just came out on video here, and which Echo has been talking about daily since I arrived. (She claims to like "mafia" movies...hehehe!) Not a bad flick.

January 30th, 2001

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