tokyo
Tokyo, in some ways, was everything I thought it’d be. Weird plastic food replicas and other products that don’t need to exist, bright lights, I mean seriously bright lights, tons of people, signs not quite in english.
We walked around the red-light district. Red was actually pretty poorly represented; there was a lot of yellow, actually. There were hotels with posted rates for ‘rest’ and ‘stay’. Posters of half naked women on the street and posted rates for who knows what…. Pretty crazy, but I think I expected perhaps even crazier?
There were also parts that I didn’t expect at all. We’re staying in Taito City (I think that’s what it’s called). It’s quiet and quaint and more or less serene. There are small streets and it’s not super crowded. We walked to the zoo[1] which is a park that’s filled with green stuff.
[1] I can see the appeal of zoos and I think there are good ones and there are bad ones, but, is it that hard to put animals in reasonable sized areas rather than tiny cages that look like prisons? Even so, I was excited to see the okapis and pigmy hippopotomae.