Oh, Tokyo

As my Tokyo trip winds down (the big positive post is still coming, don't worry) and typhoon season winds up, I wanted to make a list of some of the differences between here and home before I either 1. forget or 2. get swallowed up by a whirling vortex of doom.

- The amount of public father-child combos is astounding. In the Bay Area it's extremely rare to see a dad and his toddler doing the shopping or riding transit without mom somewhere nearby, but in Tokyo dads strap their spawn to their back or plop them in a basket on their bike and go. In fact, it's so refreshingly adorable that I'm sure if I were lactating, I'd have sprayed milk on several strangers by now.

- Using the facilities is kind of an art. For example: rather than just the trusty ol' lever, public toilets in Tokyo come complete with a panel of buttons attached to them or the stall wall. After much experimentation, I've discovered one button is usually for calming music, another for the sound of a stream of water (apparently Japan is ultra-sensitive to the of sound human fluids, so they disguise it with the sound of nature fluids), another activates the bidet, and, if you're in the Hyatt, another will powder your ass like a baby. And while getting my business scented and powdered was pretty awesome, let's get back to the bidet for a second. In addition to the bidet button, there are a bunch of bidet-related buttons that do things like adjust the shape and strength of the spray. I turned the spray strength all the way up once (or twice) and can I just say, there is NO REASON to have a stream of water of THAT force coming at you in THAT area. Ok, actually, I can think if a reason you'd want that but dudes, a public restroom is no place for that kind of thing.

- Mayonnaise is like God's gift to mankind. Everything comes with mayonnaise. The pork donburi my roommate ordered yesterday? Came with mayonnaise. The chips I just ate? Mayonnaise flavored. What was my tofu steak covered in? MAYONNAISE. Please take your notion of Japan as the epitome of healthy eating, douse it with mayo and chew it up because it ain't true.

- 2 months in and I still can't wrap my head around how seasonal this place is. Once the cicadas started dying it took about a week before the trees stopped sounding like they were wrapped in telephone wires and before I could even process the fact that summer was ending a typhoon came in and punched me in the head. It's now 66 degrees and all I've got are sandals and tube tops.

- Food is also seasonal. In the summer the vending machines that litter this city (seriously, there's one every fifty or so feet) are filled with cold drinks and in the colder seasons they're full of hot drinks. Some of them even have cans of hot corn or miso soup. Also, forget the chicken nuggets, McDonalds adjusts their menu too. When I first got here the hot ticket was an egg burger drowned in creamy pepper sauce, and now as I'm prepping to leave the new thing is an egg and chicken sandwich slathered in thousand island dressing.

- It costs $20 to watch a movie in the theaters.

- Having a cockroach in your house does not mean you're a filthy slob, it just means you left your door open.