Tokyo Tuesday

John and I rode the trains today without others to guide us and we got around just fine. Even my Passmo card worked. Japan is a little bit ahead of us in everyday use technology, at least for the part of the country where we live. To ride a train you touch a Passmo card to a round disc at a gate. It tells the machine how much money you have on it. A ride is $3 to $4 depending on where we go.

Our room key is like that too. In order to get in,you touch the card to the door lock. It's wonderful.

Our train ride was uneventful. We watched the scenery go by. It's a city so everybody lives close together. The first place we went was the Koza church.We misread the materials and thought GA was there. We walked around the streets some and looked around in a grocery store. Someprices are similar to the US and some are much higher. Hamburger costs around $7 a pound and beef about $12 a pound. They have all kinds of interesting looking, new to us vegetables.

While we were walking around near the Kozo church, an airplane kept flying overhead, back and forth. It was flying quite low for an airplane and it was noisy. It was one of the big, old planes with 4 propellers.

We met a Japanese man on one of the trains whose son is studying at Washington University in St Louis. I asked if he spoke English and he said scoshie, which means a little (although I probably spelled it wrong). He asked if we were from Africa before we said we were from Missouri. John has a very good tan I guess.

When we walk on the sidewalks, it is best to keep left rather than right, although not everybody does. The sidewalks are full of hundreds of people, and some bikes, so it takes a bit of navigating. The majority of the men here wear suits and ties in black, dark gray or very dark blue,no matter what the time of day or night. Men are clean shaven and have short hair but not shaved heads or crew type cuts. They have hair.

Women's dress varies depending on age and whether or not they are working. Many wear dresses and suits but slacksare also very common. Some of the young ones like to wear very short shorts with high stockings. Very few males or females wear the kinds of clothing that young people who enjoy Japanese culture in the US wear,t shirts, black, dragons and that sort of thing. Less than one person in several hundred dresses like that.

The Japanese people tend to be shorter than the Americans. Most seem to be between 5 ft and 5 ft 7 inches tall. The Japanese people are almost all slim. I see an occasional one with a belly, but none are obese. The Japanese people walk a lot more than the average American and they eat differently. The diet has a lot less fat. They eat rice and soup every day,for example. They also eat lot of produce and fish. There isn't much in the way of deep fried or sugary foods. They drink a lot of green tea too.

Some of the foods I am not so sure about here are the runny scrambled eggs and the bacon that is still mostly white and flexible. I don't eat it. I'm not too sure about eating French fries for breakfast either. It doesn't seem right. The green salad is okay though. I skipped the fish. Too strong a smell too early in the day.

Japanese people nod in greeting and often bow. The nodding comes very easily. It is somewhat automatic. All of my life, I have nodded to people as a greeting. It's really cool to have all these people nodding back. Some smile and look a bit surprised even that an American does that. It is probably a practice that started when my parents and I lived in Japan for a year when I was very young. As our tour guide said, it becomes a habit and you do it automatically without thinking.

The toilets get a lot of attention in Japan. There are the ones with the warm seat and with the buttons that are pushed to wash a person off. There are the squat toilets that are almost to the ground and the elongated toilets without seats. Toilets are a topic of conversation because people aren't always sure at first how to use them.

The streets of Tokyo have signs on every block that are big maps with a "you are here" spot. Among all those sky scrapers, if you are not sure how to find your way back, these are a great help.

Speaking of signs, there is a white board in the lobby of this hotel that says Cumberland Presbyterian at the top. They tell us to watch the board for announcements. We have been watching it, but it has only had something on it once so far.

We went over to General Assembly for a while. They were debating some very small things then deciding there was no need for a vote on them. Some of the people who got up to speak were not as well informed as they could have been. During the break,one of the delegates told me they would get the information just before it was voted on so they really did not have a chance to study anything that was coming out of the committees. Somebody gets up and reads the recommendations of the various committees then the delegates ask questions,make comments and vote. Many delegates each year have never been to GA before, so they can be at a disadvantage. That's a really good point. It makes it very easy for those who are at GA year after year to have a big advantage over the others. I don't know what I think of that.

Some of the Japanese pastors in the hallway had a sign saying they are looking for someone to teach conversational English to Japanese people as an outreach of the churches. The details have not been set yet so it is still in the planning stages.

Tonight John and I walked around the area and bought some Japanese food for dinner from a takeout, quick shop style store. I had rice balls,a couple of them seaweed wrapped. It is sort of like sushi. There was also one fried shrimp, one piece of chicken and one small dumpling. John had some fried chicken and a corn dog and some green tea and Japanese bread. We ate in our room.

It gets dark here early by 7pm and it is light by 4 am so we wake early and go to sleep early.