So, life in Tokyo. It's like All laundry detergent's "small and mighty" line: compact packaging, highly concentrated. In this city, everything crowds in claustrophobically close: the buildings, the people, the street traffic, the sounds. Luckily, our apartment takes up the top two floors of the building, so we have a fairly open view of the surrounding area--but when I go to bed at night, through my window, I can see what my neighbor in the building next door is cooking for dinner (yesterday, it was stir-fried vegetables). When you walk the narrow streets, your life is pretty much in constant peril, as you dodge the two-way flow of bicycles, motorbikes, cars, and buses squeezing so close, I wouldn't even have to stretch to graze their sides with my fingertips. And in Tokyo, everything is "on" at high volume: music blasting, lights glaring, store clerks hollering their welcomes and announcements of what's on sale "for a limited time!!!", every thing performing to capture your attention...except that you never know where to rest your eyes. Even my washer/dryer combo machine, though impressively quiet, plays a song so loudly when the clothes are done that I can hear the frantic tune while in the shower.

But of course this is just a single facet of life in the city. I'd move on to the positives...but the baby has woken up. And she's mad.