The Wayfarer Blog

Was the previous post coherent? I was pretty tired and it was hard to really explain what I wanted to say. (Does blogging when you’re too tired=a recipe for confusion…?) :rolleyes:

I am off to bed. I am fighting off a cold. I haven’t had one for a long time, which is really saying something, considering how tired I have been. If I go to bed early, maybe I can avoid it…Tomorrow, I have to teach an intensive TOEIC class (7 hours of TOEIC…yay!) at a company. I go there once a month on Saturday.

BTW, tonight, I saw a red Ferrari Testarossa as i was crossing the street to go to company. I was within a meter of it! It was sweet. I have seen a few Ferraris in Tokyo, but this was probably the first time I have gotten so close to one. (If you don’t know what a Testarossa is, you can check out the Wikipedia page here.)

This is one of those little moments I have that never seem blog-worthy, but for once I am going to post it, just because it was a bit surreal to me.

Tonight, during a break between a two-hour class at my home school, I went out to a vending machine to get a drink. As I was putting my money into the machine, an odd, conflicting set of stimuli really hit me:

1. Business people were walking past me, laughing and talking.
2. I put a 5-yen coin into the machine and it didn’t accept it (10 yen, which is about 12 cents, is the minimum you can use).
3. A restaurant was playing music on its speakers: that old Motown hit: “Shop Around.”

I don’t know. It just amused me. Maybe I was just tired, but it really struck me. It was just a good example of the kind of thing I never would have expected in Japan. Hearing music like that, or seeing famous American movie stars hawking Japanese products on countless billboards…

Does Cameron Diaz really use the same cell phone provider as me? Does Richard Gere own property in Japan? And does Tommy Lee Jones actually crack open a can of Boss Coffee when he needs that extra burst of energy to kick butt? Somehow, I doubt it. But I’ll keep my eyes peeled. Especially when I walk past a Softbank cell phone shop!