entry nº 10 // 20170907

wonderland wonderful place!!

wonderland live forever!!

–motto inscribed on the side of a huge pachinko parlor, as seen from the train near meinohama station

so, i’m back in japan. that’s right, you know the one: where mountains + oceans seem to surround you no matter where you’re standing or which way you’re facing; where people are unbelievably polite and customer service is impeccable across the board; where the beer is light, always, all the time; where electronics stores just go right ahead and play multiple songs simultaneously over the storewide speakers, along with about eight other layers of more localized tunes and voices and characters talking at you; where very young children walk the streets + take public transportation, unaccompanied; where it’s kinda normal for old ladies to dye their grey hair purple (couple days ago on the street i was like, “shoko, check out that cool artsy older woman with the purple hair!” and she was like “no, that’s not too uncommon, actually”); where vending machines abound in great numbers, offering both cold and hot beverages. yeah, that one. 

i took the plane over here, of course. long flights are awesome cause you get to watch tons of movies in a row and you don’t have to feel bad about it or like you’re somehow wasting your time or watching movies during the day, especially when you’re screaming across the sky at some inhumane speed and not really sure how your relationship w/ the int’l date line is changing anyways, as you go, so who knows anyways. here’s what i watched, in order:

BOS-LAX: “the man from u.n.c.l.e.” [pretty good], “minority report” [just now it took me a solid ten minutes remember having watched it this at all]

(at LAX, pretty darn hungry, shoko and i decided to get lunch from the famous “panda express”. so i waited in a big line to order food for the two of us while she held it down at the table w/ all our luggage, and, standing there, i felt this deep, wide sense of joy in the anticipation of sitting down with our orange chicken and chow mein and shanghai beef or whatever it was we ordered. i was probably beaming as i walked back to the table with that tray in my hands)

LAX-NRT: “the big short” [omg ugh it was SO GOOD, like too good], “the circle” [also took me about ten minutes + a scroll through some IMDB list before i remembered this one], the first half of “john wick 2” [plane landed before i finished, and so of course now i’m like “but how is it gonna end”] 

and that’s it, i think. i also read “zodiac” by neal stephenson, which i bought at boomerang’s for 27 cents, and which had typos in it, and which was okay. nowhere near “snow crash” which i simply could not put down once i started reading it earlier in the summer. 

anyway, shoko + i spent our last night in the states at the revere, MA hampton inn near the airport, due to our balls-early flight the next morning (and thanks to the generosity of my parents!). earlier in the evening, we froggered our way across some horrible muffler- + happy-meal-littered parkway in order to get a target nearby, and boy was that something. ever walk to a target (not including one of those “city” targets of course)? those things are not meant to be walked to. great bargains though. after that, we made our way via blue+orange lines to JP to spend a solid couple hours at the galway house w/ some real good friends, and it was a most excellent way to say goodbye for now to my old neighborhood and our friends and all the other good stuff out there. 

first thing we did after getting dropped off at our place by shoko’s mom, who most excellently picked us up from the airport, was to head over to maki no udon, which is pretty much my favorite restaurant at this point, i think? how you get there is you go left out of our place, go through the park a little ways, and then dip into the woods to the right, hop a little fence, pass between the gas station + the little abandoned dentists’ office, dash across the road, and you’re there. takes about 3mins. it’s pretty much the best place ever, meaning, i guess, that it does all the things i want a restaurant to do, in the best way possible. we always sit at the counter, which is great because you get to watch the action on the other side, where the noodle man sits there making beautiful, fresh noodles on the cobbled-together-looking noodle machine (cobbled-together-looking as in, the way you turn on the conveyor belt-fed device that feeds the dough into the noodle-chopper and then sends them flinging into the boiling water on the other side is by pulling a piece string that stretches overhead. pull it again to turn it off. on a shelf in the back of the kitchen, you can definitely see a roll of replacement string for when it snaps. no switches here.). fill in your order on a little paper sheet and in what seems to be a maximum of about two minutes, the server comes over with the most beautiful, fragrant, teeming bowl of udon you could imagine. “boy oh boy” is what you think at that moment, 100% of the time, as you heap on a ton of scallions and get ready to dig in. yeah, maki no udon is great. it’s bright inside. the music they play is typically japanese radio hits from 20-30 years ago. most of the people who work there are in their 40s-50s, you’d say, but the customers any time you’ve been inside seem to run the gamut from high schoolers to families to grandmas+grandpas. your meal costs about $5. you pay at the register when you’re done. 

of course, none of this even begins to get into what i was doing all this time in america. huh. that’ll have to wait until the next one, lest this thing turn into some totally ponderous 8-10kb monstrosity or something. bye!