Viggety vacation.

A few stories from my four day trip to Tokyo and Nagoya:

• When I first arrived in Tokyo via night bus, it was really really early, so I took a train to Ueno park, which is maybe the equivalent of New York's Central Park (though in my opinion, much prettier). I was just kind of sitting by the pond, watching some ducks and turtles and fish, when this guy walks up with a box of graham crackers and starts feeding the carp. He offered me half of the box, and we fed the carp and the ducks for a while. Neither one of us said a word. Like he could have been Chinese or Korean and I wouldn't have known. It was...cool. He just showed up, we fed carp, and then he left.
• I went to the zoo in Tokyo. Yep. The zoo. It was actually kind of funny. In the building with the reptiles and amphibians and fish and stuff, they had bluegills and crayfish and American frogs and toads, stuff I used to run around and catch as a little kid. It was weird to see that kind of stuff in a zoo.
• I went to the Tokyo Met to check out some art, and I gotta say, I do not recommend museums in Japan. You know how when you go to a museum in the US and there's that annoying Asian tourist who's like stepping in front of the display and doesn't know when to be quiet and stuff? Yeah, well there are hundreds of them here. All the same, the art was really cool. Many of the paintings were just of a kanji or two. As annoying as it is to try to read and write Japanese and Chinese, I have to admit that their characters are really beautiful.
• Went to another Baystars game. They won 2-1 in extra innings. They had the bases loaded in the bottom of the 10th with two outs, and Kinjoh hits the crap out of the ball, and I thought it was going to be a walk off grand slam, but instead it hit the wall for a walk off would-be double. I was told that this was the 11th straight game the Baystars had won. Nice!
• Since I hadn't had enough baseball, I also hit up the Japanese baseball hall of fame. To my surprise, you're allowed to take pictures inside, so I now have pictures of Sadaharu Oh's 756th and 800th home run balls, a bunch of Ichiro and Matsui crap, bats signed by Babe Ruth, Hank Aaron, and Jackie Robinson, and tons of other cool junk. I think their museum must have doubled its supply of stuff after the World Baseball Classic. They had a lot of stuff from that.
• I went out to the bay area of Tokyo, and the beaches there, like all beaches in Japan, were terrible. But the weather was nice, and there's a beautiful view of Rainbow Bridge and a bunch of the Tokyo skyline, so I stayed until sunset and took some beautiful pictures, and then I rode a boat back to the mainland. Sweeeeet.
• The next two days were spent in Nagoya doing sumo whatnot, which nobody cares about except people I've already told.
• When I got back to Kanazawa, it was the Fourth of July, so the interns and I bought a huge bag of cheap Chinese fireworks and set them off down by the river. Before too long, the people who lived in the house across the river from where we were came outside to see what all the racket was about, then promptly went back in their house, then promptly came back out with their own huge bag of cheap Chinese fireworks and put ours to shame. Nothing says inter-cultural understanding like blowing stuff up together.

The End.