One-offs, pt. 3

Japanese schoolkids really are staring at me as I walk past; I thought people were lying about that. Nope!

KFC biscuits here have a hole in the middle, like a donut. I have no idea why.

Land's at such a premium here that you have to pay through the nose to play 18 holes of golf. Apparently a single round costs upwards of $200 to play.

Japan's suburbs are a jungle of powerlines.

I passed a parking lot on the way to Fuji that was 6x2x3 spaces. That's two rows of 6 slots apiece, where each slot has an elevator that lets cars park in stacks of 3.

It is REALLY REALLY hard to order lunch from a tiny old Japanese lady while the R&B music she has blaring in the background is explaining in quite explicit detail how to make sweet love to a woman.

I am allergic to something in this country; I keep sneezing.

The one-yen coin is aluminum, so it's really lightweight. This makes it fun to flip (I'm always flipping coins), as it either goes really high or spins really fast.

If you're ever not sure where to go in Tokyo, look for a line of yellow, ridged tiles leading in a certain direction. They tend to point you were to go. For example, they tend to be from metro entrance gates to the machines that sell their tickets, and train tracks to station exits.

This country is SERIOUSLY obsessed with wrapping things. I mean that both jokingly and dead seriously. Get anything that could possibly be given as a gift (a bottle of wine, a box of sweets, any kind of electronic), and it WILL be gift wrapped at the register, regardless of whether you want it to be or not. I don't know the Japanese for 'I don't need this to look pretty; I'm going to rip it open in about 5 minutes,' so I tend to just go with it. On the serious side, going to a shrine or temple, you can sorta see why. Traditional Japanese sweets are a pretty common offering at Shinto shrines, and a wall of colorfully wrapped packages is really impressive to see arrayed around an altar.

Even when people don't wrap your purchases, they still seal it up somehow. Whenever I get something at a shop and ask for a plastic bag, there's about a 75% chance they'll use a sticker to hold the sides of the back closed.