Just before departing from Okinawa I was finally able to get ahold of an old friend who had been in Europe for the past month. We had a great dinner at the airport before my flight to Tokyo. She's a really wonderful young woman, stuck between three cultures, which makes life that much more confusing. It was great to mull over the complications and simple bits of life with her again. Sometimes good conversation and a smile can lighten the emotional loads life doles out, even if it doesn't particularly make it easier.

Between the evening of Saturday December 22nd and the morning of Friday, December 28th (and most of January 7th during a layover), I spent my time exploring the Greater Tokyo Area, the largest metropolitan area in the world with a population exceeding 35 million people. Days were filled with the buzzing, looping mazes of the train and subway system shooting my friends and I from one borough to the next, each with its own personality, temples, restaurants, and shopping destinations. Daylight glittered on hoards of my-sized people moving from this place to the next amid shiny tall buildings and old cedar tori. Evenings were ablaze with thousands of tiny colored lights illuminating the holiday season. The first two nights were spent at Ayumu's family home in Chiba, the second at Atsumi's family home in Saitama, and the final two were spent in the country home (chickens, rabbits, and all) of Rika, just outside of Narita in Tako. Christmas Eve was highlighted with a German choir caroling in the ritzy Roppongi Hills neighborhood and Christmas Day concluded with a home-cooked meal including a full chicken and fixings in addition to roll-it-yourself-sushi and a phone call from home. The whole experience was an impressive mixture of family (lots of mothers, fathers, and grandmothers), friends (new and old), and the electrically throbbing heart of Japan, the Eastern cultural hub, steel, concrete, neon, and koi pond, Tokyo.



More Tokyo photos here!

On the morning of Friday, December 28th, I departed for India, where I remained until the night of January 6th. I need to wait a few more days to decompress, to let the events and images and everything wash through me a bit more, to miss the warm, red dirt of Katna under my fingernails, the constant honking of Agra's rickshaw horns, the towering architectural beauty of the Mughal Empire, the pleading faces of children begging for money, the energy of young, brightly uniformed students, and the company of my travel companions before I can say much of anything. But it will come soon. Many pictures, too.