c is for cookie 2

AND i just finished my 4th 10-cookie oreo tube in this past fortnight... maybe that's why i'm tall!

n.b. no, replying to this message saying things like "no, maybe that's why you are fat" is not exactly a witty (or true) remark.

ok, i was curious again

i googled up the world's average height and this link says it's 5'9 or 1m75 for males and 5'4 or 1m62 for females.

wikipedia says the national average in japan is 1m72 for men and 1m59 for women...

i am a giant indeed...

by the way, men are 1m85 tall on average in the netherlands!!!!!! WOW!

goliath meets the japanese

friday, 28 june 2008

18h56

according to the last measurement taken by my doctor, i'm 1m83, which doesn't make me a giant by any means but i definitely feel like one in this country. in some ways, it's a good thing. for example, whenever i'm standing in line or in a very crowded place, i have a very good view of everything that happens around me, and i don't feel like i'm suffocating. i've been looking for some pijama shorts lately and, following alex's recommendation, i went to uniqlo (which mexicans in japan find really amusing because it sounds like "one ass only" when pronounced in japanese) and it was nice to realize i'm an XL-size in this country, which makes it easy to find pretty much anything, even those items on sale which are usually sold out on every other size but XL and above (by the way, i'm an M in the US!).

in some other ways, however, it's not that great. for instance, doorways are often too low and i've hit my head more than once. lamps in restaurants also hang too low so i always have to be very careful. worse than that is the effect that small japan has on food. i am never full after eating at a japanese restaurant. it's amazing because it does seem like a lot of food when they bring that many dishes that compose a whole meal -- miso soup, rice, seaweed salad, some beans or vegetables or some sort, fish... all in small plates. but it sucks because it's not that cheap and i always need to stop by mcdonald's or eat my tube of oreos when i get back home.

coffee places are funny (and by the way, it's funny how japanese keep interchanging fs and hs... not everywhere but i think before vowels like i or e... coffee in japanese is ko-hee). they have these small-size cups which, if used in america, people would think they are a joke. even at starbucks, they have the traditional tall, grande, and venti sizes, but they also have a small size, which most people order by the way!


i'm now at this seattle's best coffee branch in shinjuku and it's been a crazy day. i haven't done much but walk around this area -- very slowly. it's hard to walk any faster given how crowded everything is. shinjuku station is one of the biggest train stations in the world and it's amazing to experience the chaos, both underground and outside in the surrounding streets. inside the station, there are kilometers-long hallways packed with all sorts of stores, and outside is not much different. what amazes me is the number of high-end stores in the city. how many bottega venetas have i seen? how many louis vuitton? and how many starbucks? seriously, if i was told that there are more starbucks in tokyo than in, say, new york, i wouldn't be surprised at all!!

anyway, i have to go now because i want to walk all the way to shibuya and harajuku... but i'll write later about the party we had at my place last night (this morning?).

*** ok, i was curious and looked it up. shinjuku station is the second largest station in the world after nagoya station, but it's the busiest of the world, having handled an average of 3.6 million passengers per day in 2007!!!

image: wikipedia.

my top 10 things that have impressed me most in tokyo

i was planning on presenting a list in reverse order, from 10 to 1... but then i decided it's really hard to decide which item is 5th and which item is 6th, etc. so here they are in no particular order...

1. japanese are extremely polite and very orderly. arigatogozaimasu or thank you must be the most commonly said word in the world, not only because there are 130 million japanese people in the world but because they say the word at least 50 times a day.

2. my taka-taka friends are also extremely respectful of the law. i am amazed at how pedestrians stop at traffic lights and wait until they see the green man-light to cross the road. it doesn't matter if there are no cars in sight, they won't cross!

3. safety. for being the biggest city in the world, it's crazy how safe this place is. in all of my travels, i've never felt safer before. people go into stores and leave their dogs tied to poles, with nothing but their leash. they use their laptops and cell phones and ipods and other crazy gadgets in the subway, in the park, just sitting on the sidewalk. somebody told me that you could leave your wallet on a table at a mall, come back 2 hours later, and your wallet would still be sitting there.

oh, but if they do steal it, blame the chinese (or the koreans). it's all their fault...

4. and i mean all. japanese people can be very racist. i still haven't had experienced any racism but i've heard that they don't like black, they don't like brown... and of course, they don't like chinese and korean. but, although i haven't heard anyone express unfounded disgust directly towards any member of these human races, i have indeed heard things like koreans are all ugly (in a conversation that had to do with how to distinguish a japanese from a korean person) or chinese people are very dirty. i guess stories like that of the famous chinese dust effect don't help at all. the japs blame it all on our friends from the continent.

5. how clean the whole city is, especially because tokyo is the largest city in the world! and even despite the fact that it is hard to find garbage cans. i always want to throw away used napkins, chewing gum, a foam cup... and i always have to put it in my bag because i can't find any trash cans.

and here, i must tell a little story that has to do with both the clean and orderly habits of japanese. there are tons of maps all around the city, you know, those standing displays that show the typical "you are here" red dot in a big map of the area. about 3 days ago i noticed some graffiti on one of these maps near my house. the graffiti said you are here in very big, purple letters with a big happy face. it was kind of shocking since it was very big and i hadn't seen any graffiti anywhere around the city.

and then i learned why.

today, only a couple of days after the incident, the graffiti was gone. somebody had cleaned it and i was most impressed they noticed it and cleaned it this quickly.

6. how friendly people are. i think that we have this stereotype in the west that people in japan are very conservative and shy. even this american guy who's been living in japan for the last 20 years told me that japanese people don't usually talk to foreigners. well, i don't know if i've just been lucky or if things are changing, but a lot of people have talked to me just randomly.

i went to this yakitori place for dinner in shinjuku. i ordered 5 chicken skewers, the chef's selection, just to avoid having to choose between heart, tripe, and kidney, etc. i was reading my tokyo guide while eating and all of a sudden this guy taps on my shoulder. i turned around, and it was this 50 year old guy who didn't speak any english. he asked me things like:

kon-to-ri

which i later understood to be country, so he wanted to know where i came from.

mekisko

said i, proud of at least knowing how to say the name of my country in japanese. he offered me some of his top shelf hot sake, and i accepted gladly. and for the next 30 minutes we communicated, sometimes in broken japanese and english... but mostly with pictures and hand gestures. it was great.

he wanted to drink more sake with me but i thought his wife was a bit impatient and i also didn't want him to order another bottle just to drink it with me, so i refused. as soon as they left, another couple sitting next to me turned around and started to talk to me. this time, the guy (atsushi) spoke english because he had lived in texas during his years in elementary school before coming back to tokyo with his family. the guy did all the talking, but i also communicated with his girlfriend, and she told me about miyazaki, nikko, hakone, and all these places i must visit before leaving japan. we exchanged cards and promised to go out for a drink in a couple of weeks.

finally, one other day i was looking at a map on the street, trying to figure out if i could get home taking a different road than the one i usually take. a girl stopped by and asked if she could help me. i tried to explain what i was trying to do and she told me where that road went, but i didn't know if that's where i wanted to go. in the end, she was not very helpful but as i thanked her very heartily for stopping by, she waved at me, bowed, and told me "thanks for speaking with me, i'm studying english and i like to talk in english." i thanked her back and then, when she was gone, i thought i was a fool and i should've asked if she wanted to go for a drink. she was cute too. damn it.

7. how care-free people are... to dress, to act, to do whatever they want. i would think that people here don't ever make fun of their friends, at least not the way we do in mexico or the u.s. yes, perhaps kids call each other "fat" or something like that when they are in school... but i don't think a friend would ever tell another friend how ugly her dress is or how poorly matched her whole outfit is. and i'm saying this precisely because people hang out dressed in the most varied outfits, with both the craziest and the most conservative hair-dos, with the most classy suit or the most unfitting combination of colors: white socks with black shoes and purple pants and red shirts.

the queer eye for the straight guy crew or the people at e! extreme makeover would have a wonderful time here in tokyo!

8. how expensive fruit is! $50 watermelons? $70 grapes? $40 crate of clementines? no... really!!

and 9. and 10. i will write later because i did have another couple of things, but i'm forgetting now...

c is for cookie...

there's only so much noodle soup, sushi, and japanese desserts a western man can handle.

today i had this crazy craving for a chocolate mud cake. i guess i could've gone to tgi friday's or outback steakhouse and i would've got it there.

instead, i bought a 10-pack of oreos. as i had my first bite, i was instantly transported to heaven.

i ate the whole tube in less than 5 minutes on my way home.

lack of communication skills

friday, 20 june 2008
12h20

yesterday, i went for lunch to this "cuban" restaurant which served jambalaya and burritos -- you can imagine how cuban the whole experience was. i went with a colleague from work, a u.s. professor who's been in japan for a while now. talking with him revealed me much about this so poorly understood culture. i learned, for example, about how the compensation system in companies and universities works in japan. from my conversations with my japanese friends and my little research on japanese workers' productivity and their satisfaction at work, i have learned that there's very little variance in the salary of workers within the same tenure-skill category.

the amazing thing is that workers seem unable to negotiate their salaries and one very important reason for this seems to be that they simply don't talk about it. the topic is so not discussed that, after my colleague's friends advised him against raising the issue with his supervisors-to-be when he got the job here, he then realized that his pay would be extremely low compared to his former job and in spite of what the prevailing "market" wage was for people in similar positions. only six months later, when he was about to quit, did he receive a letter stating that he had been "promoted" and would receive a huge pay increase retroactive to his first day on the job!!

how did that happen? well, apparently -- and even more bizarrely --, wages at public universities are set by the ministry of education for every single worker... but then they are regulated by the school, so they can change this salary to whatever they want later on. that's all very weird but the strangest thing is that the school never even told him this would happen so the poor guy must have been depressed for half a year thinking he had made the worst career move ever.

now, it seems as though this sort of miscommunication is very common. foreigners are often confused because they don't know exactly what a japanese person implies by something she did or said... and japanese people who have lived abroad say that even they don't know what their countrymen (and women) mean in many occasions... and i guess locals who've never been abroad would think the same if they only knew any better!

i can perfectly kimagine now a wife who leaves her husbane, maybe because she had to be single to apply for a job, or claim an inheritance, or something... only to tell him six months later, oh, nevermind, it's ok; i just did it for the job, but now i got it with the nice compensation package and all, and now we can get back together and make it up for all the sex and good memories we missed in the meantime.

now i think i begin to understand the whole suicide thing!

walking around asakusa and ginza

thursday, 19 june 2008

21h30

this city has kept me awestruck 24/7. it's hard to put in words the "good vibe" you get from it, just from walking around, interacting with the people. everybody is happy and helpful and they bow like a million times when you ask for directions, when you get into a store, when you say hello, when you say goodbye... they are so polite and they look so happy. i wonder how is it that their suicide rates are so high...

the city is amazingly full of contrasts. first, there's all the starbucks and mcdonald's i mentioned earlier but still it's like these people don't buy into the whole western thing. sure, they love their louis vuitton bags and armani jeans, yet they look so detached from what happens in the west. it's just unreal.

on saturday, when i went to the flamme d'or building, i first visited some of the temples in the asakusa district. it was a very strange experience. when you get to the main shrine, you see a lot of people who just stay outside by this huge square pool. as they approach the pool -- but before they even get there -- they throw some coins at it, then stop by it and pray and bow for a few minutes. then, a lot of them go to one of these structures on both sides of the pool, which look like big chests with drawers. they get a long cylindrical metal can, put some coins inside, and shake it violently, then open one of the drawers and take a piece of paper from there, read it, and then either laugh or just make a quick comment to their friends and leave. only very few of them actually go inside, into an area that seemed to be off-limits to tourists.

once i had my religious quota of the day, i went to ginza. this area is just ridiculously rich and fancy: there's ginza street, a strip packed with the most exclusive boutiques and designer stores, and then a bunch of streets around it that look just as fresa. the stores all look incredibly trendy and swanky -- and, yes, they are all full with customers. everything's just like the more famound 5th avenue in new york -- only like 10,000 cleaner and cooler! seriously, ny's 5th is nothing in comparison!

one of the stores which grabeed my attention was, of course, the sony building: six stories (+2 others with cafés and restaurants) of the latest computers, cameras, stereos, tvs, videogame consoles, and some other products like sony's life planner or something like that. this is basically a computer that calculates how much you need to save, spend, etc. in order to achieve your financial goals at every stage of your life, and it does all the research for you. say for example you tell the computer you want to buy a house in southern france, because you'd like to retire there when you are 65. the computer just happens to know how much your house is expected to cost and takes into account a bunch of other things that you most probably wouldn't even consider -- everything from your wife's age to whether your kids will be done with college or whether you'll need to make a few trips a year back home to see your parents if they are still alive -- all probabilities of death, etc. included. just ridiculous.

anyway, the coolest thing were the showrooms, where you could just walk into a living room, for example, and watch a movie on the best equipment -- tv, blu-ray, sound system... you name it.

my dream store.

on sunday, i met alejandro, a mexican guy who's working at the embassy and we hung out around otome-sando and the shibuya district. again, this area reminded me so much of ny and times square with all the huge screens, the neon ads, and every street packed with people... but everything like 100 times better! jaja for some strange reason, even in the midst of all the chaos, one of tokyo's busiest areas still looks very orderly: the streets are spotless and all traffic signs and pedestrian crossings impeccably painted. there's no honking, no ugly yellow cabs driving like maniacs. people wait to cross the wide streets and it's an amazing sight to stand at the main crossroads when all cars stop at the red light and 2 seconds later thousands of people just flock onto the roads and cross the streets in all directions. i love it.

and, of course, there's louis vuitton and armani and everything you can imagine, here also.

on my first day in tokyo, as we walked around roppongi looking for a place to eat, katsu said to me:

anything you want to buy, you will find it here.

only now do i believe this statement was 100% true.

on top of the world

saturday, 14 june 2008

15h05

i'm now having a café au lait in the sky room on the 22nd floor of world-famous architect philippe starck's building "la flamme d'or". the room's very cool, a bar-type sitting arrangement along the wall -- the wall being a massive window that provides spectacular views of the city. too bad i'm here by myslef. this is exactly the kind of place you want to share with a travel companion: after a long day of sightseeing, you take a coffee/beer (if they had a large mcdonald's coke here, i'd get that), you sit here, enjoy the vistas and try to identify the landmarks in the horizon. on the upside, being by myself gives me a chance to catch up with my writing -- especially since i'm away from my computer.

back to the day of my arrival: having dropped off my bags in my room, katsu and i went to get something for dinner. we ended up in this ramen place, very local, which i liked. i was supposed to accompany him to meet a couple of his friends but, being all tired and jet-lagged, i decided against it. i said goodbye, then walked around the neighborhood before heading home. although roppongi seems to be the ex-pat hangout borough, i couldn't help but be surprised by the number of mcdonald's and starbucks around there. even more surprising, though, is the presence of so many local places free of gaijin or foreigners... and the fact that even in the american chains few people speak english. it seems that, although tokyo's been unafraid to embrace the american capitalistic values, it's still reluctant to yield to the anglicization (is that even a word?) typical of the most fashionable tourist destinations (do you hear me, cancún and bali?). good for them.

the next day i woke up and walked to grips, where i'll be teaching. the school is only a 20-minute walk away from my place and, even in spite of the rain, it was a very enjoyable walk. i met prof. koichi hamada (yale professor who hooked me up with this tokyo teaching gig) and my 10 students. just like my roommates, they are also from all over the place, mainly countries in south/southeast asia and africa, and a couple from japan. i tried to be very nice and asked them to send me an e-mail telling me about their interests and the reasons why they're taking this course. given that the class is so small, i think i could tailor the material to suit their interests, which would make it much more appealing and enjoyable for them. i already got a couple of their e-mails and it's funny they address me as de la garza sensei... and it's particularly funny because most of them have worked for policy institutions or government offices like the ministry of finance of their own countries, and they must be at least around my age. but even professors here address other professors as sensei, so i wonder if they'd feel awkward if i asked them to just call me adrián.

later that day, i got to meet a lot of the staff and walk around campus. koichi introduced me to otsuka-san, the director of the program, and sonnobe-san, who got his phd from yale about 15 years ago. then sonnobe-san introduced me to a lot of other profs, all of whom are impossibly nice. i also met the administrative assistants and they are all extremely helpful and seem to go out of their way to make sure i don't need anything. i have my own office and there's a fitness center in the building, so it seems like i'm all set to spend the next 6 weeks here. there's even a community center in the building and, for a fee of only 1,000 yen/month, you can get all-you-eat/drink snacks, coffee, and tea!

and speaking of coffee, i'm done with mine, so i'm off to ginza now for some window-shopping! :)

watashi wa adrian desu

saturday, 14 june 2008

13h36

i just had a delicious bowl of pasta with shrimp and tons of salsa cholula (God bless the mexican exporting companies)... in tokyo's asakusa neighborhood, one of the oldest parts of the city. it doesn't sound traditional but that's just tokyo today: unconventional.

i arrived three days ago, on wednesday, and katsu picked me up at narita airport. as soon as i got here, i got a glimpse of that avant-garde, techy, über-modern japan everybody in the west imagines. we took the subway and katsu didn't have to buy a ticket: he just quickly passed his cell phone through a scanner and the right amount gets charged to his cell phone bill. then we caught a taxi and as i approached the car and reached for the door, it opened automatically and then closed after i got in.

i went to the sakura house main office, the company from which i rented my room during my 6-week stay in tokyo. i felt weird as i went over the lease agreement and signed... who would've thought i'd ever get my own place in tokyo, even if for a short period?

my room is no fancy place, but at 98,000 yen/month, it's a bargain. it's about 25 m2, which is way bigger than all those 6-8 m2 places i saw online for $1,800/mo. the best thing? it's located in the heart of roppongi, the equivalent of times square in ny, dupont circle in dc, or polanco in df. the guesthouse has about 15 rooms, and there's definitely a strong "auberge espagnole" feeling to it. every day, i wake up and i see a new housemate getting out of the shower or having coffee in the common area. last night i came back home, and a bunch of them were hanging out in the kitchen: gustav from sweden/turkey, justin from canada, michael from germany, simon from australia, another guy from france and another couple of swiss blokes. a lot of them have been in japan for a while now -- gustav, for example, has ben around for about 5-6 years; this other guy from ohio, andrew, has been living in the house for like 3 years. and all of them seem to speak japanese fluently or are taking japanese classes. it's funny how my friends and relatives at home think i'm this super world traveler... then i look at these other people, and i realize i'm such a novice...

i don't think i've ever felt so lost in any of my previous trips. in most of the other countries i've been to, i 've always been able to communicate somehow. even in china, at least i had taken about 4 months of mandarin classes, which was enough to get by. here, i've been only in some very touristy places of tokyo, japan's capital and main city... still, sometimes i've been hungry and i've had to postpone my meal just because i had no idea of what the things on the menu were -- even with pictures. and, normally, i wouldn't mind trying things out, but i've realized these people eat every single limb and organ or every single living being on this planet... and at 3,000 yen ($30) per dish, i don't really feel very adventurous just to be (potentially) grossed out.

anyway, so far, so good... but the food in general is expensive. i don't think i'll try any of the restaurants in my time out guide, since the average meal at those places is at least 2,500 yen. other than mcdonald's and the ramen (noodles) places, it seems hard to find anything below 1,000 yen.