Back in Tokyo

We are back in Tokyo, and in many respects it feels very familiar and comfortable this year: I know my way around on public transportation and where we're living, and the daily or even hourly experience of confusion is much diminished this year. But we've been traveling around the city quite a bit already so our students can learn the basics of the train lines, the city geography, and the special etiquette of being amidst thousands of people. And in just these four days of travel, I am amazed as I physically and mentally recall that amazing feeling of sensory overload and exhaustion.

[Hotdog stand mascot at Narita Airport.]

We all made it into the country with no problems, though the quarantine is quite strict. Crews of twenty or so, in surgical gowns, masks, and gloves, board the plane, scanning all passengers with a heat detecting camera for elevated temperatures. One poor soul two rows behind me had a fever, and forty or so of us were kept on the airplane as a result. She was given a physical and questioned, and after half an hour, officials determined she was not carrying the swine flu. But Saturday, when the students arrived, officials found the first case of the swine flu (three Japanese nationals returning from Canada), and forty people from their flight are in quarantine somewhere for ten days.[Roses in Yoyogi Park]

For their first full day in Japan, we took our students out to the Harajuku district, to keep them on their feet for the day. It was surprisingly hot and astonishingly crowded, but we visited Harajuku bridge, the adjacent Yoyogi Park (with its beautiful rose gardens), the Watari-um museum (to see some photographic work of Rei Sato, who is affiliated with Murakami's KaiKaiKiki Factory), and Shibuya (to get art supplies and walk one of the busiest intersections in the world).

I'm still figuring out what I will write about this year. I'm interested in the constant array of maps that one finds around the city, in different styles and designs (and often inaccuracies), like the map above of the Yoyogi park.
[Harajuku cat girl]

I also want to visit some different areas of the city to look at public spaces and movement. It's a treat to return to familiar sites, but there are so many districts of the city I haven't even passed through, so one challenge will be to find the time to see some of the new things. In the meantime, I still have to adjust to jet lag and Tokyo exhaustion, as I now feel something like this clock:
[Clock sculpture in the Ginza shpping district]