TOKYOh My God!

I'm on the other side of the world. I am in your future. The Sun that you see rising has set here hours before. I am in Tokyo.

A thirteen hour flight isn't nearly as enjoyable as it sounds, fortunately, Nippon Airline has a delightful Steerage section with amenities such as "all middle seats!", "Non-reclining seats", "Ground beef and rice for breakfast" and "Industrial strength air-conditioning!" But the best part is their state of the art time machine. Just enter the plane cabin and in half a day you'll be in tomorrow.

It is however a process worth going through to get here. Personally, I love everything Japanese. From their delicate cuisine to their obsession with futuristic technology, their nonsensical metro system to their sparkling, whale-free seas, I love it all.

This is my third time to Tokyo and I want to think that I know my way around a little. Which I don't. Tokyo is a city that feels as though there is no difference between inside and outside. You can walk down the sidewalk and then miraculously find yourself in the basement of a department store, having never walked through a door. There's perpetual artificial daylight, and I'm not sure if that's good or bad for jet-lag.

This morning Rebecca had the fantastic idea to venture to the fish market at 5 am since that is when the ships deliver all of their catches. Who could have imagined how amazing dead sea creatures are? I saw live octopus, giant clams, squids, huge, HUGE tuna and even some whale. It was crazy. We walked through a maze of vendors hacking away at enormous tuna with knives taller than me, all while dodging millions of fishermen on electric carts dragging fish from one dock to another. I watched in horror as Rebecca continually escaped near death as these carts flew by. It was bring a tourist to work day, only no one really cared about the safety of the tourists. If someone got hit by a cart, I'm pretty sure that they'd just throw your body on the back of the cart and then hack you up and sell your meat as dolphin meat. And I'd probably end up loving them for it. They're so much more efficient than us.