Oh, I Think So

There are seven people in my department and when we were summarily sent away from the offices of the client where we worked happily, we were given the choice of working from home or from the main local office.  Everyone excitedly went home even though they gave them 45 pages of rules they had to follow except for two of us who returned to the old office where we used to work. The hours lately have gotten longer and longer and the two of us still work in the office.  My associate is especially dedicated and works long hours without complaint.  "Let's just go home on time," I sometimes say.  "Sure and when we get in tomorrow it will be twice as bad," he says.  He is, of course, correct so we try to catch up and get ahead of it and get all our work done for that day. Staying so late is a pain and years ago we each pretty much stopped making plans after work with friends or family.  It is what it is, we figure.  My associate has a train schedule and...

The dipping sauce The Udon noodles and the hardboiled egg, ready to go Ladies and gentleman, here we have the dip.  Tsukumen.  The noodles are thicker than ramen noodles and the hardboiled egg and the noodles come in one bowl and the dipping broth and the pork and the slice of seaweed come in another.  The noodles find their way into the dipping sauce via chopsticks and the broth comes to your mouth via the spoon.  This is my favorite dip from Rokurinsha which is in Yaesu Mall, adjacent to Tokyo Station, a place where I almost always get lost.  There is also a location in Tokyo Skytree and, frankly, when I saw it when I was went to the top of Tokyo Skytree, I could not resist it. One of the good things about Rokurinsha in the Yaesu Mall is the morning dip.  I got there at 7:30am and I still had to wait.  There was just one person ahead of me so it was about a 30 second wait.  The regular lunch or dinner size of tsukumen -- pronounced "S...

So, in a nutshell:  Tokyo is hot, hot, hot in the summer.  English seems to have been replaced by Mandarin as the second language of choice but, as it was in Osaka, I made myself understood.  Japanese baseball is much more fun than American baseball.  Public transportation is a wonderful thing.  Tokyo is also a vast city, high and wide and distant.  Those charming drawn-by-hand maps that they give you at a hotel or at a store are rarely going to get you anywhere you need to go but become great souvenirs as you sit and look at them afterward and recall how you never found shit from it.  Sumos on bicycles are adorable and some of them are not as big as you'd imagine.  Put them in western clothes and they look like very built men with very good posture.  There are no weight classes in Sumo and the biggest, heaviest Sumo compete against people like Enho who is 5'6" and weighs 216 lbs (or 168cm tall and 98 kg in weight in metric). I went to the ...