Kawaii sells

If you have to ask ...

As a point of reference, brand new uncustomized versions of these posh scooters are around $5k USD.  When you lower it, do custom leather upholstery on the seat and throw on a wacky yellow metallic pearl lizard skin paint job, well ... that's just fuck money levels of extravagance.

Plenty of room

It's always going to be hard to take pictures on the subway without looking like a weirdo creep, so this one is a little sideways.  After the girl here squeezed into the train, another 4 people got on after her in the same Tokyo subway fashion; see a spot big enough for your foot, stick it in there, and then slide the rest of your body in to the car while simultaneously twisting to face the door and compacting the crowd of people behind you.

How many ways can you say "no parking"

Apparently 'No Parking' in both Japanese and English isn't enough, even when combined with the international symbol of a bike in a circle with a slash through it, and threats of fines from 3000円 to 5000円.

Toilet humor transcends cultures

Shibuya intersection, dirty window

Empty subways

I finally managed to get a spot against the end of a subway car on the way home last night.  This is important for a few reasons when it comes to taking pictures.  One, you want to be able to show the entire car which you can't really do if you're standing in the middle of it.  Two, with your back to a wall, no one can see that you're taking a picture of a train full of complete strangers.

This is actually a fairly empty car for a commute run.  I left work a bit late last night, but on a normal night you would literally cram another 25 - 30 people into this picture.  There are a dozen train lines leaving Shibuya, each of them sending a train out every 4 or 5 minutes at the slowest, and most every one of them will be absolutely stuffed to the gills for about 30 minutes on each end of the working day.  This morning, I was jammed into a car so tight that I could feel the people around me breathing.  Not that I could feel their breath, but I could actually feel their chests expanding and contracting.  There were guys on the station platforms helping push people in to the trains, and then helping shove the doors closed so we could leave.  On the plus side, you will never have to worry about falling over as there is simply no room.  I'm just happy that I will never have to stand there with my face buried in someones back like all the 5ft tall Japanese girls do.

Orange moon

The iPhone camera is not exactly adept at the long distance lunar shots.  Still, a nice twilight shot of northern Setagaya, even if you can't make out how freakishly orange the moon was that evening.

Phonetic translations don't always work

This was part of the sidewalk in Akihabara, the area that is a computer/electronics geeks neon wet dream.  Any piece of electronic or gaming related gear you can possibly imagine can be found here, as well as all the diodes, LEDs, cabling and circuitry required to build them all yourself.

Turnstile jumping with a walker

A 75 year old woman completely jumped the turnstiles in front of my this morning leaving Shibuya.  She just wedged herself in behind the guy in front of me and followed him through so closely that the alarm didn't catch her.

I am also still confused most mornings by the piped in bird chirping noises they play near the stairs off the platform.

The arrival of stuff and where to put it

This is about a quarter of the stuff that was delivered today, and about half way through them unpacking the majority of the boxes.  We have now moved four times in the last three years, with two of those being international relocations.  At this point, I feel like a freaking expert on relocation companies and their services.

These guys today were very good; just as efficient as you'd expect a Japanese moving company to be.  Every corner and walkway in the house was covered to protect it from damage while they were carrying things in and the unloading of the trucks was incredibly detailed.  All the furniture came in, then a small break, followed by all 85 of the boxes with me standing in the kitchen marking the numbers off the inventory and pointing to a room, then it was lunch time.  After lunch, seven guys tore through all of the boxes unpacking everything.  Not putting things away, but at least unpacking them, and sometimes putting away when it was obvious.  The end result is an entire house offloaded and unpacked in less than 5 hours.

Unlike every other crew we have worked with in the past three years, this one did not have the dimwit that is always responsible for breaking something, or leaving entire drawers unpacked.  When we moved into the San Jose house, one of the packers left the entire bathroom untouched and got a beating from the crew foreman.  Moving to Sydney was just a nightmare because of one guy primarily who thought it was super OK to stack dishes together with no padding, although that entire crew kind of sucked and damaged a lot of our furniture as well as being slow, over-priced and bitchy.  The move within Sydney had a guy who liked to just put boxes randomly throughout the house, so a year later we would still be finding kitchen boxes in the garage, and I had to go back to the old house to retreive a few items they missed.  This time, the packers in Sydney were about to leave a few things unpacked, like entire drawers full of clothes in our closet, until Jae caught them.  We also are missing a bed ... an entire bed.  We received the boy's mattress, but no box spring, headboard, or runners.  It's not on the inventory for the items leaving Sydney, and definitely isn't still in the house there, so they must have put it in with the storage items  Dimwits.

Out the office window

FBI

Community radio is not something that carries a good mental image in the US.  It brings to mind live Grateful Dead recordings and 8 hour jazz sax solos.  FBI in Sydney, however, was actually really good, which was a blessing as the commercial radio stations there really blow.  Not everything they played was always something I'd listen to otherwise, but it was usually at the very least interesting.

I thought I had hit pay dirt when Jae sent me through an app for the iPhone that lets you play streams from online radio stations.   But, probably as a result of being a poor, public supported station, the quality of their stream is really poor.  It drops so often you can't even really listen to it.  Shame.