Tokyo

First stop Tokyo. It's been really cool so far. Tokyo is sort of everything to one people. We walked through about 6 totally distinct neighborhoods and as many shrines again. Probably the best part was the Tokyo drum museum. The have a collection of 1000 drums from around the world. I'm not sure how many of them are replicas, but they look pretty authentic. The awesome part is that you are allowed to play about 25% of them yourself. Add the fact that Sharada and I had the place to ourselves, and you have a blast. Totally goes against the stewardship that most American museum have in place for their artifacts by allowing people to wail on them, but it recognizes the fact that, what good is a drum 100 years from now if no one plays it in the meantime?

There's a lot less English than I had anticipated, but just enough to get around. We had a fabulous dinner last night and our waitress spoke reasonable english, but seemed incredibly nervous about every word even though she never really made a misstep. I think maybe this is a widespread feeling and people who can speak don't out of embarassment. I know that's how I feel about my 5 words of Japanese. Today we're going to take a stroll through the posh and fashionable neighborhoods on the other side of town where the teenagers vie to put American youths' outrageous fashion sense to shame. I may have to convert to this "Gothic Lolita" mode of dress.