My heart fluttered, knees weakening as I gazed at the tall, crimson felt-backed knife display, visible through the glass-paned door. I congratulated myself on once again overcoming what I’d come to find were the seemingly insurmountable odds of finding a knife shop in a city world famous for it’s knife production. Then, amidst near tearful revelry as I reached to slide open the rickety wooden door, I stopped short. No knob or hand-hold was to be found. A trick? An illusion?
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My next stop was a planned one. According to my previous research, Ashi Hamono knife shop would be on a nearby block. Stumbling into Mizuno Tanrenjo had been an unforeseen, yet happy coincidence. I was now back on my pre-planned route.
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I woke up the next morning in time to shower and be down in the lobby by the 10:00 check out. The man from the previous day wasn’t there; instead a cheerful middle-aged woman sang out a rapturous “Good morning!” from behind the front counter. I placed my key in front of her. “Thank you very much, and have a nice day!” the woman cooed. In Japan you don’t take your room key with you when you leave the hotel. The desk clerk keeps it and then gives it back to you when you return. It’s actually a pretty genius system. There’s not much that’s easier to misplace than a card or key that doesn’t belong to something you own.
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On the bullet train I felt pretty confident about my plan. My friends were all shocked; they said I was nuts. But lately I’ve been feeling kind of nuts, so it seemed like a natural fit. Things have been rolling quickly lately – really mounting up – particularly this month: work is busier than ever, I’m making lots of new friends, turned 24, split up with the girl I was dating, nearly passed the halfway point of my contract here, and it’s about to be 2010, and I don’t know if I’m supposed to say “two thousand ten” or “twenty ten” and since there aren’t a lot of native English speakers on hand I’m sort of own my own on that one. Anyway, it’s been a big December so far with both good and bad. So I decided to cap it off with some fresh capers.
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It’s been a long while since I last updated, and that’s mostly because I’ve been all over the place with new friends, work, and loads of cooking shenanigans. But unfortunately no really blog-worthy events have unfolded recently. I do have a couple little incidents to relate, though.
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