Rich and Strange Aeons

I have returned. Another 90 minutes journey. Fortunately, the Shonan line emptied out at Shibuya so I got a seat most of the way.

Discoveries:

• the JR train doors are labeled with a sticker, "car 15 door 2". You'd think they'd like the flexibility of mixing units, but nope, a traincar is dedicated to being Car 15 for the rest of its life. Weird.

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I did make it out! Later than planned, but still. Tokyo National Museum (TNM), a big art museum, by 14:05 (ticket time). I figured it'd be a bit under 3 hours, but ticket price was 1000 yen, high for around here but a good deal by US standard.

Fun fact! Friday and Saturday, the museum closes at 20:00, 8 PM. So, like 5.5 hours after rest breaks, for US$7.( Read more... )

Say you order Amazon to a nearby pickup location, because of theft, or Airbnb, or whatever. ( Read more... )

Welp, guess I'm way behind on updates. Fortunately several days were boring. But not this one. Kind of.

Kamakura, as in "Kamakura Shogunate", was accessible, so I went. Outbound was on the Enoden train, no changes but still slower, scenic, single-track, kind of hugging the coast. ( Read more... )

Thanks to the pandemic, this isn't my first Christmas alone. Or even the first in another country. First in a country that doesn't care much about it, though. Japan does care a bit, so I thought I'd at least take a peek, after two days in for leg recovery and rain-avoidance.

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In non-Japanese news, I've been reading the Books of the Raksura. I think the Murderbot books are more entertaining, also better edited -- bunch of low level grammar errors in these. Still, they've become entertaining. I read "The Falling World" by mistake; going back to the actual first book was much more intelligible.

Watanare 7 is in the queue; I look forward to it with a mix of anticipation and "what drawn-out shenanigans now?" dread.

Watatabe anime continues to be good.

I read the Bovadium Fragments, a recently published Tolkien thing, basically a short satire about cars in Oxford, and political fight over a bypass road. Was interesting both for his writing and the historical context of cars taking over an newly-industrialized Oxford.

And, this should really have its own post, but a review article on whether it's fair to call SARS-Cov-2 "airborne AIDS". Short answer: strictly speaking no, they're pretty different. But there's a lot of evidence of SARS2 messing up your immune system in its own ways, with rising rates of other disease infections and maybe cancers, so in a "should I really try to avoid getting this?" sense, then yes.

If there's one food that's cheaper in Japan, it's low-end sushi. Supermarket had a tray of 8 seafood nigiri: 2 salmon, 2 tuna, mackerel, shrimp, the big roe, and some pink gel. 598 yen. $6 by PPP, which is already good deal; $4 by exchange rate. Probably would be $12 in a Philadelphia supermarket, or $15.

But! I actually got it at 50% discount, near closing time. So 8 nigiri for $2.

...maybe I should be more aggressive about walking off with as much discount sushi as I can carry...

My knee had started hurting as I returned home from Chigasaki, and since Seki canceled our Sunday plan, I just stayed in to heal up. Didn't even go outside. \o/ Bluesky and Raskura reading.

Today I did some food shopping, getting a decent supply of whole wheat and rye bread. Then back to Chigasaki to meet Seki again, and explore a new mall -- he says it opened last week! We ate at a Spaghetti Goemon that isn't even on Google Maps! Otherwise it's not that exciting a mall, but he appreciates having a new restaurant option near him. I appreciated the low CO2 of mall restaurants, especially at 16:00. I had spaghetti with pork shabu-shabu and "lots of vegetables"; it was good but I had to fight my own brain, which kept expecting Italian-ish flavors from a spaghetti dish. ( Read more... )

"How can you feed yourself without a car?", some Americans and Canadians ask.

As mentioned before, a Lawson's conbini (convenience store) is directly downstairs, though that's admittedly unusual. Despite being rather small, it has milk, oranges and presumably other fruit, ham, raw pork, pasta, olive oil, udon, eggs, and frozen vegetables. This is just from popping in and out of it, without mentally cataloguing everything it does carry (thus the 'presumably'.) You could probably cook a balanced diet just from it alone, if you wanted.

[Edit: okay, so I checked several other conbini today, and mine is unique in passing for a small grocery store.]

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And you know? Most of all this area is detached single-family houses. Two-story, minimal yard, not that far from each other, but houses not sharing walls. Sample, sample, sample, sample, sample, even some two-story apartments/houses in the commercial zone

So, you know that Japanese people mask more than Americans or Europeans. But how much more? Some numbers from today: ( Read more... )

So, 40-50% generically outside, and 50-75% on trains. On the "masks and exercise" front, I'd note that many bicyclists have been masked, too.

Further, almost but not entirely all of customer-facing employees have been masked. Train, bus drivers, retail shop employees, the few waiters I've seen. I'd say at least 80% conservatively, 90% likely, maybe not much higher (it takes few outliers to push a ratio away from extremes.) I think Seki said that waiters often aren't, but I dunno.

Now, is this the New Normal after covid? Not necessarily. Japan has been having a bad flu season, huge spike in cases, and a major strain (coming soon to a school or hospital near you) wasn't in the vaccine this year, so I think the government has been urging people to mask again. Also it's winter-ish and some people here may have noticed "masks are like a scarf but better."

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Gonna take a while to get used to these time zones differences again. I realized in the shower that as I was preparing to go to bed before Monday, for most of my friends, Sunday morning was just beginning. Also, that's probably why Oglaf hasn't updated yet -- it's Sunday! My webcomics schedule is in confusion. ( Read more... )