Top 10 - with contributions from Monica and Claire

Just in case a rosy picture has been painted about my experiences to date...

10 innocuous, everyday things we do that apparently offend the Japanese:

1. Eating/drinking while walking and going about your daily business.
Commuting to work, running errands, etc. Imagine just one day in your week when you couldn't carry your Starbucks around with you. That's us EVERYday. Starbucks here has to-go cups, but we can't figure out why, since it's considered rude to drink and walk. Nobody on the subway, walking down the street, or sitting in an office has a Starbucks cup. It's a total mystery.

2. Talking on your cell phone in a public place.
Walking through the subway station or walking down the street. In the U.S., everybody talks on their cell phone pretty much anywhere they can get reception. Here, the subway stations are packed to the gills with commuters yet everyone is silent.

3. De-ricing sushi.
Rice is sacred here. To eat only half the bundle of rice under the maguro is a sin. Servers are not very happy with they clear your plates and one is stacked high with rice piles.

4. Lack of elevator edict - talking while in the elevator is not allowed. This is quite frustrate when you are in mid-conversation and have to postpone until you have reached your floor. There is a greeting that is muttered upon entering and exiting the elevator that does not solicit nor require a response/acknowledgement however it is required - go figure.

5. Not wearing hosiery and going barelegged. Wearing stockings with open-toe shoes, or better yet, wearing knee-high stockings (sometimes black) with a skirt AND open-toe shoes.

6. Showing emotion (aka smiling, laughing, etc) - apparently these are not activities that are embraced by the Japanese culture

7. Expressing an opinion - as a woman having an option is not recommended or encouraged

8. Amount of food we consume - the amount of food required to fuel our normal sized bodies is offensive because the majority of the women here make Nicole Richie look obese (think Kristie Alley pre-Jenny Craig)

9. Walking into a restaurant without a male companion - the women are not expected to eat without the presence of a male; this is our presumption because we have yet to see a woman dining at out night.

10. Using the "loo" without pressing the fake flush noise button. Every woman (not sure about the men) here uses this function to mask her natural #1 noises

Top 10 things that make us go "WTF"

1. Wearing stockings with open-toe shoes, or better yet, wearing knee-high stockings (sometimes black) with a skirt AND open-toe shoes.

2. Mouth noises. Apparently smacking and slurping are just a normal part of the dining experience.

3. The morning commute. Subway stations are so densely crowded with commuters that every day is like playing Frogger. You arrive at the office exhausted from your near-brushes with death.

4. All the shit that hangs off people's cell phones, even men's. Grown men and women have Beanie Babies, bells, Hello Kelly trinkets and assorted tchotkes hanging off their phone, sometimes doubling or tripling the size of the phone. WTF.

5. No towels or air drying facility is provided in the bathrooms. Individuals will carry pieces of terry towel (often of designer provenance btw did you know Chole does mini wash clothes) to repeatedly dry their hands with or mop their sweat up with - how can this be hygienic?

6. The quantity of make up worn by individual women (although no guilty parties in KSA Japan). In some cases this is almost mask-like in its thickness and doll-like in its perfection. There are some women who apply so much mascara they can barley blink.

7. The intensity level of MAX STRENGTH exercise classes - are we missing something? There was some shaking of the limbs and heavy breathing (mind you the whole class was in Japanese and we only understood the "right" and "left" commands). The only reason we broke a sweat was from laughing and/or lack of AC (see #8 below)

8. No AC provision to save energy is surely counteracted by electricity required to power fans and decreased productivity levels

9. Excessive multiple packaging - they are militant about saving energy and recycling however each time you make a purchase it gets wrapped in 3 layers of plastic plus a bag.

10. Recycling - it's insane here. We are of at least average intelligent people (although some may disagree) and we still have a difficult time figuring it out. There is a place for combustibles, non-combustibles, bottles, and cans (the reason why we don't have a place for cans in our work area is because we are not allowed to have non-lid items in our work area - more to come on that point).

Top 10 Things We Like About Japan

1. It is not illegal to drink alcohol on public transportation (i.e. no open container law) however see point #1 in "10 innocuous, everyday things we do that apparently offend the Japanese" This does come in quite handy when you have had a really bad day - more to come on that too (and you thought we were all fun & games here!)

2. Internet access 24/7 anywhere in Tokyo via the smart card that now hangs outside of our laptop

3. Subway station signs that tell you how many minutes til the next train arrives.

4. The "hundred yen" menu at McDonald's... mini chocolate milkshakes for under a buck.

The rest are still TBD... the challenge will be getting to 10 by the end of the project.

Today's entry is provided by guest blogger, Monica

Julie's a little bit tied up at the moment, so I've been asked to guest-write a spot on the blog. It's a lot of pressure, but since Julie is doing all the heavy lifting on our project work, I guess it's only fair that I pitch in here.

It's been one week since our return to Tokyo from Hawaii. Every day is a challenge, best summed up as a series of events that are classified as either wins or "loses."

Top wins:

1) Every morning, breakfast is a lot like Russian Roulette. Enter the local convenience store and head back toward the refrigerated section where they have an overwhelming array of packaged foods. Some packaging resembles things we have back at home, like yogurt and juice boxes, other items have only Japanese writing on them or an English phrase such as "Calorie Mate" and nothing that indicates what type of dietary situation the product would be appropriate for. Yesterday's game of Japanese Food Roulette was a "lose": Julie went in for what she thought was a fruit salad, but actually ended up with something that resembled canned fruit cocktail suspended in clear gelatin. Yum. However, this morning we had a WIN: Not hating our Japanese Roulette selections of the day: some type of chocolate flavored balance bar thing and cantaloupe yogurt.

2) After a very long day at work and a workout at Gold's Gym, we were both very excited to try a restaurant called Rainbow Roll Sushi, purported to serve "Western" style sushi: California rolls, Dragon Rolls, Spicy Tuna Rolls, etc. After studying the subway map and making a few poor navigational decisions, we finally found Rainbow Roll Sushi only to discover it was closed for renovation. Frustrated, we set out to find somewhere else to eat and stumbled upon Food Magazine, Tokyo's answer to Whole Foods, where we sat outside and had a decent meal of mini pesto pizzas, green salad, and screw-top Shiraz. [A quick aside... the grocery store didn't have plastic cups for the wine, so we resorted to emptying out our water bottles and drinking wine from them. Julie commented "Brooks would DIE if he saw us right now, guzzling $13 screw-top wine from water bottles." And my response was "No, Brooks would be proud-- he would understand that you gotta do what you gotta do."] Dreading our 7 block schelp back to the subway station (each of us carrying two bags containing: laptop, power cord, notebook, work files, umbrella, iPod, cell, assorted cosmetics/toiletries, gym clothes and sneakers), we debated whether we should take a $30 taxi ride home or suck it up. We then realized that the shopping carts here do not have anti-theft devices on them (crime is practically non-existent here), so we decided that the perfect solution would be to "borrow" the shopping cart and use it to push all of our stuff to the subway station. We had a minor setback when Julie overturned the cart crossing the street and dumped the entire contents onto the sidewalk. No worries, we ignored all the strange looks and glares and quickly scooped everything up and continued to the subway. WIN: Not getting arrested for borrowing the cart and safely depositing it at the entrance of the Roppongi Hills subway station.







3) We rode the coolest roller coaster last night...Tokyo Dome's Thunder Dolphin. It goes 80 mph and does a 80 degree vertical drop (yes 80 degrees, as in... almost 90), then it whizzes you through the center of a hubless ferris wheel and through a hole cut out in the side of the building. WIN: Not dying on Thunder Dolphin.









Top "loses":

1) While in San Francisco last weekend, Julie purchased a cool new pair of kicks from Cole Haan and wore them to work on Monday. After work Monday, we went to Gold's Gym near our client site for our first proper workout in Japan. You have probably heard that the Japanese are pretty persnickety about wearing street shoes indoors, so many establishments require you to remove your shoes before coming inside. Gold's Gym is one of those types of places, requiring shoe changes that would give Mr. Rogers a migraine: remove street shoes, put on "locker slippers," remove locker slippers and put on bathroom slippers (if you have to visit the loo), remove bathroom slippers and put locker slippers back on, remove locker slippers and put on running shoes...finally you are ready to work out. It's certainly no wonder that our friend Julie might have lost track of her Cole Haan shoes. At home on Tuesday morning she discovers that the left shoe is missing and decides that it is either: a) at Gold's Gym or b) on the sidewalk near Roppongi Hills (see shopping cart story above). Sherlock Donaldson-Holmes takes a digital photo of the right shoe and hopes to use it to identify the left shoe with the non-English speaking Gold's Gym staff. Tuesdsay afternoon we returned to the gym with Kawaguchi San, our project principal and translator. After much un-decipherable back-and-forth in Japanese, it was "regretfully offered" that it would be "difficult" to recover the shoe. LOSE: the new shoe.






2) Lunch time at the client cafeteria is interesting to say the least. It's a typical cafeteria-style setup, where you grab a tray and peruse a selection of hot food and some pre-made sandwiches. But most of the hot food is traditional Japanese-- ramen or soba noodles, tempura, pickled vegetables, grilled meat, etc. On our inaugural visit to the Aeon cafeteria, we were pretty happy to see that there was a spaghetti bar-- your choice of meat sauce or pink tomato cream sauce. I opted for the tomato cream sauce and for a second wondered why they garnished the spaghetti with shredded, dried seaweed. Well, it should have tipped me off that this was not your ordinary "penne a la vodka." They actually take a bunch of orange colored fish eggs (tobiko) and mix it in to the pink sauce, giving the spaghetti a really weird fishy, oceany taste. LOSE: my lunch.

It's been fun being the guest blogger, but I promise that you'll have Julie back next time (I think she is super busy right now planning her August vacation to Bali).

Back in Tokyo

I'm back from my whirlwind travels of Hawaii and San Francisco... More on those places later. I awoke Sunday morning at the time of 4:30am and begin with the same few questions I have started asking myself:
1. What country am I in? Answer: Japan
2. What city am I in? Answer: Tokyo
3. What time zone am I in and what day is it? Answer: way too early; Sunday (Happy Father's Day, but oh wait it's still Saturday in the states so calling now would be too early)

After settling the basics I started the day with a battle between me and the washer/dryer. Have I mentioned that the washer/dryer is literally ONE machine - you put the clothes in and they are washed and dried without human intervention. Since I like to dry some clothes for just a few minutes and others all the way, I selected the wash only cycle and would follow up with the dry only cycle. The wash only went fine (clothes seemed clean). The dry only cycle started fine however when I wanted to pull some of the my clothes out the machine would not open. Mind you the instructions/buttons are in Japanese so they make no sense and the "cheat sheet" that the apartment gave me doesn't help that much either so I'm flying blind. I started hitting random buttons, closing and opening lids and finally success! Score: Julie =1, Tempermental Washer/Dryer = 0

I had found a yoga studio online and decided that would be my adventure outside the apartment for the. Monica and I decided to stop by the Starbucks for a pick-me-up before we headed down to the subway. I ordered a frappacino and a banana, which was right on the counter near the register, so I went to pick one up when all of a sudden the Starbucks employee slapped my hand! I'm not kidding; I was astonished and completely taken a back by the reaction (Monica was in utter shock). He informed me (in Japanese) that I should wait by the drink counter for my banana and coffee. I mean I love service as much as the next person but I think I am capable of choosing my own banana!

Yoga was a huge win - 75 minutes with an instructor from America made me forget I was in Tokyo. We asked one of the ladies where we could grab brunch around the studio and she suggested this great place as well as a proper grocery store with American brands and magazines!! Monica and I were sold! We spent the afternoon pursuing the streets near Roppongi Hills. The grocery store was awesome - I never thought I'd be so excited to see Tide, Skippy peanut butter, and People magazine in English. However victory was spoiled when we learned how much the maganizes were - $10-20 yikes! We had to make some smart selections and ensure the biggest bang for the buck.

After Roppongi Hills we headed to the Grand Hyatt to check out where Lost in Translation (btw - I have a new found respect for that movie!) was filmed. Realizing we were very under-dressed for the restaurant/bar we opted for the street level cafe. I ordered a diet coke (whatelse) and was pleasantly surprised when a very large glass appeared however was unpleasantly surprised to learn this large glass of dc was going to cost me $8. For an $8 dc and Monica's $8 tea we decided to make camp for a while and enjoy our newly purchased magazines!

Dinner was another adventure... we met David (head of the KSA Japan office and basically a native) at a subway stop near Roppongi Hills (our new favorite place in Tokyo). We went to a very authentic place where we did have to take off our shoes (note to self - must remember to take socks when going out!) The floor was covered in bamboo type rugs so it felt nice. We had a variety of food for dinner - ceaser salad, crab cakes, some sausage thing, sashimi, etc all were good. After dinner Monica and I were ready to head home when we saw the streets where filled with people all wearing Japan's world cup jerseys. The game started at 10:30pm and folks were beginning the celebrations at 8pm - crazy.



One more thing... it's rainy season here which means it is 85 degrees and drizzles all day long. So you are hot and sticky not to mention damp all day however no one else seems to look as disheveled as I do - must be something you just get used to; wonder how long that will take??

First Few Days

So I've made it through my first few days...

Getting to and from - the subway system is great here - very clean and super quiet because no one talks and everyone is text messaging! On my first day to work Monica and I got a bit confused at the transfer station. We were running down the steps once we found the right train and both directions had trains ready to depart. Monica was yelling "pick one, pick one" mind you this is my first time on the subway not to mention first time going to the office. I went with my gut and luckily we boarded the right train! I think I've got it down now however I still feel like a salmon swimming up stream because you are supposed to walk on the left here.

Eating - I've had a variety of meal since I've been here. My first team dinner was a 7 course meal at some fancy restaurant (where we did not have to take off our shoes). The first course was (I swear) some kind of fried insect - I mean these things had antennas! The team tried to convince me otherwise - they swore it was fried fish. Fried whatever I was NOT having it! The remaining course weren't nearly as scary and I actually enjoyed most of them. Lunch on Thursday was at a Korean bar-b-que place where we did have to take off our shoes and sat Indian style on little cushions at the table. Food wasn't that bad but I did have to follow up with a diet coke (tastes similar to in the states but not as good) and some chocolate - thank goodness for staples! I did break down yesterday and talked Monica and Claire into Italian for lunch - wasn't that great but better than fish and rice :) There are a million restaurants here and all have plastic food out front so it is pretty easy to order.

Sleeping - The bed in my apartment is really comfortable (no it is not the futon in the pictures) however Japan does not observe day light savings so it gets light here at 4:30am! That fact combined with the jet lag has been killer. I just managed to get over my jet lag yesterday and now I'm off to Hawaii for our off-site meeting.

Other stuff...

The toilets here are really different! Well, I can only speak for the women's restrooms... first, the seats are heated (random) and there are options for sounds (like flushing and music) I guess so people don't here you?? And there is a hand dryer at the office restroom that you stick your hands in and the air is like a whirlwind to uber dry your hands - I'm probably not describing it well but it's weird, trust me!

One of the team members used to work at Louis Vitton and said he could get me a discount. After I began breathing again, I handed over my wishlist :) He also informed me that he had seen me on TV and asked if I was a cheerleader - are you kidding me?! I fly half way around the world and people still think I'm a cheerleader. He said he had watched college football and seen the cheerleaders. I guess I reminded him of them. Whatever!

I've attempted to purchase food at the convenience store (appropriately called am/pm - seriously) but I get scare when I don't understand the picture and of course can't read a freaking thing on the package so I've settle for buying bananas and water.

My apartment

Welcome to my apartment! This is my living room and the black in the corner is a massage chair - can you believe it! That projector is my TV - how cool is that!

My apartment (continued)

This is the other part of my living room which also serves as my office. The white screen is where my projector TV goes - crazy! You can also see my kitchen from here.

Julia - check out my yellow purse... it made it's first debut out on the town last night :)

Flight from Atlanta to Tokyo

For those of you who know my tendencies of arriving to the airport just in time for my flight will be happy to know that I arrived a whooping 2 hours and 15 minutes prior to my flight to Tokyo. I checked my bags (large bag weighed in at 89 lbs!) and headed to the Business Elite Lounge.

Once on the plane I realized that flying business class is the way to go!! I kicked off the trip with a mimosa and placed my order for what I wanted for my meal. Then I put on my noise reduction headset (thanks family!) - another must for traveling - wrapped up in my blanket and was in a peaceful sleep by the time we were flying over Iowa.

Upon arriving in Tokyo, I cleared customs with ease and picked up my luggage. Well, I really didn't pick it up, it was more of a heave ho onto cart. Then I bought my ticket for the bus to Tokyo. I was parched at this point and happy to find Coca Cola vending machines all around the airport. I put in my newly acquired Japanese Yen and made a selection of what I thought was water... however upon tasting I realized I had chosen some kind of Sprite drink. Round 2: made another selection of a clear liquid in a bottle which turned out to water! Two tries - not bad.

I met my apartment complex representative at the TCAT station and as the kind men were unloading my luggage her face went from a smile to a "what in the world did this woman bring" type look. We tried to fit my luggage in the first taxi but were unsuccessful - this was my first realization that things really are small here! The second taxi, bascially a mini van, was able to take the luggage - again two tries - not bad.

Welcome

Hi all!

First let me welcome you to my blog... my 2 tech savy friends (Julia & Caroline) convienced me creating a blog was the best way to keep everyone informed on what I'll be up to while I'm in Tokyo so here it goes!

Please feel free to post your comments and messages; even though I'm far away I'd still love to hear from you.

Take care,

Julie