Things move quickly in the last week. The beginning of the week, it was a sunny 80 degrees F, now its 50 and raining. My personal mood jumps quickly from vibrant to sad to indifferent. From wanting to stay put last weekend, tomorrow morning I’m jumping onto a Chinatown bus to get to Boston for the day — it’s for a bar association conference. Today I went to a conference about teleconferencing — why we didn’t teleconference, I don’t know. But we did find out about a teleconference about teleconferencing. Anyway, 5 hours before taking off.
Author: F C
A-part of yourself
Being the good boy that I am, and being that P works for them, I donated a pint of blood today at work. After going through the battery of questions (more than 30) and reading which countries were on the bad list, I was led to the bed closest to the room’s TV. Which was good because I was getting kind of faint after the first bag. I did make sure to eat before going, but I should have drunk more liquid. The nurse saw me turning pale, and raised my legs and lowered my head onto a bag od ice. Afterwards, P showed up and stuffed me with traditional blood drive goodies. Still, I felt rather weak and beat up. I wanted to do certain things, and my body wasn’t cooperating. My dad had to do this 3 times a week for 4 years for dialysis, making up about 600 times in his lifetime. Good grief!
Today was 1 month after my dad passed, and we had dinner with my mom at the houe. Thankfully she has found things to occupy her time. The big thing is her high blood pressure, which was a problem for my grandmother. My dad seems to find a way to make himself present; this time it was the low battery sound on the fire detector in his room. I have to believe he is looking out for us.
3 picks for restaurant week on Atlantic Avenue: Atlantic Chip Shop – great batter, Dhakaindian – much better than anything on Montegue St,; Shinjuku Japanese – pretty good but staff was harried; also was the namesake of the Tokyo neighborhood we stayed in the last half of the Japan trip.
The Cathedral of Commerce
I got home Wednesday night, so this is a recap of the Wednesday that went on for 48 hours…. my jetlag is pretty much over already.
Wednesday morning part 1: Before checking out of the hotel, I bought a Japanese yukata, a night robe that was quite comfortable. We went to several 105 Yen stores (the equivilent to our 99 cent stores) in the Shinjuku area, including Don Quiote and US Mart. Then we went to the flagship store of Mitsukoshi at Nihonbashi. Nihonbashi is a bridge that is the Columbus Circle of Tokyo: all distances from Tokyo are measured from here.
Mitsukoshi is literally the Cathedral of Commerce. There is a circa 1930 Wurlitzer organ that they play daily at the opening and at other times including noon, when we attended. A 4 storey statute of the Goddess of Sincerity stands directly in front of the organ in the main atrium. Three floors of fabulous food sits below ground, while floors above include an operating 500 seat theatre where they give cultural performances, an art gallery that rivals any major modern art museum, and an outdoor rooftop square which contains three Shinto shrines.
We indecisively chose two items of the millions of Japanese foods in the food hall, and then made the mad dash back to the hotel and to the airport. We made a bad choice of connection between subways (just say that it was the equivilent of getting off at Grand Central and deciding to walk to Port Authority) and then had a hard time finding the right exit out of Shinjuku station (which is Grand Central, Penn Station and Port Authority all rolled into one). We had missed two trains to the airport in the lost time, and came close to a third waiting in the ticket office, but instead I managed to get the ticket dispensing machine to work and we got on board in time for the hour long train ride back to the airport. Going through security and customs was very efficient, and we made it with 20 minutes to spare.
I spent most of the time on the plane asleep, twisting and turning. The attendant was actually on our flight inbound, and she was like one of those theater matrons that are attentive in a zany manner. We made it back technically one hour before we left.
I’m missing blogging for two days, the last day in Kyoto, which I will be calling “the path to enlightenment”, and the day in Taiwan, which I haven’t figured out what to call yet. Mucho work these next few days….