Rich Seymour's stochastic statements.

Ok, we’ve just finished up our third day, but I want to get our 2nd day down before I forget what the heck happened. This day was mainly a bus tour (Hato bus… literally pigeon bus, supposedly a long running tour bus line) , which I thought would suck, but it was fantastic. We saw a broad swath of Tokyo… I thought we’d be stuck on the bus, but we got to spend an hour to and hour and a half at each destination.

1st stop… buddhist temple. I paid 100 yen ($1.20) for a fortune. I drew lucky number seven. I opened the drawer to find “BAD FORTUNE” some choice lines:
“Your wishes will not be realized. The person you are waiting for will not come.”

I was not deterred.

2nd stop: Mitsuo Aida Museum … Calligrapher/Poet/Artist… amazing stuff. I got pretty emo at this museum… Check some of his extremely brief poems (badly translated compared to the museum’s translations) like this:
“If you just keep thinking,
night falls.”

3rd stop: Imperial Palace… didn’t get very close, but… I can say I’ve been there.

4th stop: Fuji Television building… kind of… not that great, but it was among many buildings on this man made island. Looked cool from the outside though.

5th stop: Tokyo tower. A taller, more orange Eiffel tower. Went up to the observation deck and saw the most amazing sunset just to the left of Mt. Fuji. Stunning.

End of bus trip.

Then we got Ramen in the sort of red light district… nothing like the Amsterdam red light district, just kind of seedy with lots of dudes and ladies asking you if you’d like to meet girls or get a massage (pronounced massagey). The ramen noodles were great and they were playing heavy metal the whole time in the ramen shop.

That’s about it. It’s way late here and we still have another day and night left.

Woo! I said today that when I get back to work I’m going to do one thing… WORK! I don’t think I’ve had a real vacation in years and … wow… it somehow puts everything in focus.