I'm giving up on soba. I saw a few shops last night while we were
looking for dinner but none were open this morning. One thing to be
aware of (I'm thinking of making a first timer post to help people
basically skip past their first trip,) is that it's not unusual
for a place in Japan to just not have publicly posted hours.
Given the state of public transit and such I wonder if it's just
a bother sort of thing. Better to not have public hours than have
them and possibly be late?
Instead I went to a bakery and got a red bean pastry    /japan/images/bun.png
(hightechified because the contrasting colors didn't like 2 bit.
Even hightechify is just 3 bit color, though.)
Trust me, that's red bean paste in there. It's just the color reduction.

Testing out an old hiking tip I've heard today. The typhoon did
remarkably little to cut down on the heat here, it nearly hit 40C in
Tokyo yesterday and I got some chafing from all the walking. I've
heard that applying deodorant to the affected areas helps prevent
it from getting worse so I'm giving that a shot.

Today's random early thoughts are on language, specifically how
it's interesting how much of an advantage and disadvantage being
a native English speaker is when travelling. English is the first
world lingua franca I think. French had a big place in Europe for a
long time but I don't think we saw street names in French in China,
there was no expectation for a random person in India to speak any
French at all, etc. Anglophone cultural and trade hegemony over the
last 2 centuries or so have created a great situation for English
readers, many places (even small ones further in the countryside)
will have an English menu for example, but oddly enough I'm at a
bit of a disadvantage when speaking I think.

I think most (all?) of my readers are from Europe, so it's hard
to describe the situation fully and hard for me to grasp the
reader's point of view. In practice in the US it's monolingual.
Everything is in English by default and there often isn't a second
option even though there's a massive population for whom Spanish is
their native language.        Oftentimes computers like a self checkout
will offer Spanish because they need it anyway, but for example
if you want a place where the cashiers will be expected to speak
Spanish they'll usually have a sign to that effect up somewhere.

Contrast this with the rest of the world where English is, for
the most part, the default second language. Practically everyone
knows a little bit. That's what gets me in trouble. I've noticed an
adoption of a sorta-English for communication. Everyone's passable,
you took a few years of it or whatever, but different countries
have different standards, different periods, maybe you only know it
through that cultural hegemony, etc. A lot of the communication drops
into a very simplified and direct dialect which I suck at because
I've never had to practice it before. The closest is ordering at a
good Mexican restaurant usually. It takes a lot of conscious effort
to boil down what I'm saying to the clearest minimum while I've
noticed that the other guests from France, Germany, etc. as well as
my friend (who's spent much of his adult life bouncing around Asia,)
feel much more fluent.


Today was largely easy. Sorta. We went for a fetish store with a lot
of latex/rubber gear but my friend kept misjudging the distance and
location we ended up with like 5km (ehh....2.5mi?) of "oh it's just
around the corner" to end up in the store. Nothing that would've fit
but that's the curse of being a tall American in Japan. The staff and
clientele were cool, though. We tried going to a monster theme cafe
after but they weren't open yet. After that I napped because the heat
index was some thing like 45C. When we were wandering for lunch we saw
that a ramen place had a line going out the door, so we tried that for
dinner. It was tiny and tight but fantastic, I wasn't as huge on the
cold shio ramen but my friend got the miso and it was wonderful.
Basically the shio broth was a bit too rich and thick to go cold and
the umeboshi clashed a tiny bit.

A lotus field (swamp?) on the way to the store        /japan/images/lotus.png

After that we found some booze at the 7Eleven and drank. I wentt
through a whole bottle of gin (a small one,) and some of my friend's
whiskey. He isn't very good at drinking though. Too slow. Too m
methodical. It's hard to belive that he lived in Korea as long as he
did.

Today's pics:
A small alleyway        /japan/images/alley.png
The gate to a famous shopping street        /japan/images/skyline.png
.