Tokyo Day 3, Morning

The morning sun...this is at about 5:45, looking to the west from our building. You can see from the reflection how high the sun is already.











Right near the building is an amazing mass of azaleas. It's hard to tell scale from this picture, but the mass of bushes is about 18 inches tall, cropped like bonsai trees, with miniature azaleas, while a few "regular" size azalea bushes grow up above them. it's pretty amazing.











I'm not sure wht this plant is, but the two types of flowers exist side by side in different combinations.

Tokyo, Day 2, Part 2

Here's the view from my apartment, though it was cloudy enough on this morning that you can't really see very far. this is looking to the east northeast, so beyond the clouds is the city center. It has been rainy here--June is one of the rainy months--but a giant typhoon coursing along the east of Japan may give us some nice weather in the next few days.

The combination of our location in the time zone and our latitude here make for odd days: the sun is fully up by 4:00 in the morning, though almost set by 7:00 pm.














Here's the night view. During the day, there's surprisingly little signage in this area, which seems mostly commercial buildings on this side of our building, large apartment complexes on the other. But at night, the neon signs off in the distance light up along a main artery.





A covert picture snatched during the trip to the airport yesterday, to pick up the remaining nine students. The trip to Narita International Airport is about two hours: slightly over an hour on a Japan Rail train from the airport to the city line, half an hour on the main loop, then some walking.

Tokyo Pictures, Day 2

Day 1

Despite big hopes for a luxurious seat on the JAL flight (here's our plane...), it was pretty cramped quarters for 12 hours. But we arrived right on time, made it through immigration and customs pretty quickly, and met up with the students arriving the same afternoon.

The trip from Narita to Shinagawa (on the south side of Tokyo) took about 2 hours, but given the exhaustion, etc., I didn't take any pictures. We checked into our apartments around 7 pm, and here are some shots of the kitchen and, of course, the bathroom...


I'll post more so you can get a better sense of the lay-out. It's a tiny room, with the kitchen on the left side of the entry hallway. They provide basic dishes and materials. The appliance on the bottom left corner is a dishwasher, on the bottom right a mini-fridge, and there's a microwave on the upper-right. One task for today is to find the big grocery store near-by.



At breakfast this morning, everyone reported the same feeling of alarm upon first use of the toilet--the extremely warm (because heated) seat. Here's the control panel. I cannot figure out the difference between the spray and the bidet, though apparently my butt cheeks are to float gently on the spray, while my whole body can ride the bidet. The flushing sound default setting was extremely loud, essentially a bad recording of an endless flush, a modesty tool to cover up other sounds.



No, I have not yet used the "powerful deodorizer."

"Nozzle clean" refers to the little bidet and spray head, and seems automatic.

And below, the control panel on the toilet seat lid. Apparently small children are not supposed to play around the toilet with water, nor to march like little soldiers on the toilet seat.