A Train Leaves Chicago

 Smoke from wildfires in the next state over are causing a haze over the city. We went out for a bit yesterday and within about twenty minutes, my sinuses were clogged and my lungs getting congested. I'm particularly sensitive to wood smoke (despite--or maybe because of--being a smoker for many, many years). Today I plan on staying in, curled around my air purifier. And if I have to go out, I'll be wearing a mask.

Temperatures are starting to rise. Recently, they've started crossing over into the mid-90s and are supposed to be higher by the end of the week. Dave's dad lives in Montana and they've also been in the 90s for awhile. Dave's coworkers are in Boston and they've been in the 90s this last week, too. Thank you, global warming. (We're in trouble climate-wise, kids, let me tell you.)

My sleep schedule is still mostly inverted, although it may be starting to swing around. I was up until almost noon yesterday, slept until about 4:30, got up and went out, came home and made dinner (vegetarian BLTs on Dave's homemade bread with carrot and cucumber sticks on the side). While we ate, we watched an episode of the recently released last season of Kim's Convenience. (I'm going to miss that show.) Around 9:00 p.m., I went back to bed and slept until just after 2:00 a.m., waking up for about ninety minutes around 10:00. (Yes, my sleep schedule sounds like a word problem in a math class.)

To drown out noise, I've been listening to videos on a youtube channel called Tabieats. Tabieats are a gay couple in their mid-50s who live in Tokyo with their little chiweenie (no really, it's a real kind of dog that is a cross between a chihuahua and a dachshund). They blog about food and travel, mainly around Tokyo, but also other places in Japan. 

Much of what they blog about is familiar to me, including blogs from my old neighborhood in Tokyo which is now quite popular because the Tokyo Sky Tree was built there. Watching them walk along the Sumida river sent me down the rabbit hole of other videos on youtube, including one from a couple of years ago in which someone filmed themselves walking part of my old route home from the train station in Higashi-Mukojima where I lived. It's amazing how much the neighborhood has changed! I'm sure there has been a huge influx of tourist dollars since Sky Tree is right next door, but the old pharmacy where I used to buy Diet Coke is gone, the McDonalds across from the station (where I stopped once the entire time I was in Tokyo because I was hungry and hungover and knew there was no food in my house and nothing but McDonald's and the convenience store was open) has been remodeled and is now a three-story monstrosity. The old hair salon B/Laugh is gone. Tom-tom, the Italian restaurant, gone. All these bright, shiny new businesses built to take their places.

On the other side of that picture was another video, taken by someone else, of the same route but in 1991. My old neighborhood was considered shitamachi ("old town") and in this older video, it looked it. There were still post-war, single-family houses and small storefronts. All of that was razed to erect apartment buildings, eight or more stories tall. That process was still going on when I lived there and I imagine it will still be going on a hundred years from now, when someone else records the walk from Higashi-Mukojima station to the main road.

One of the things I had planned to do for my birthday this year was to return to Japan, but I'm still not comfortable traveling--we are still in a pandemic and vaccinations in Japan lag far, far behind the U.S.--and I don't know what a mess it will be anyway, as the week I had planned to visit overlaps the Olympics. (What are they thinking holding summer Olympics in Tokyo? It's the tag end of the rainy season and the heat and humidity are insane at that time of year--heat exhaustion and heatstroke warnings are routinely issued in Tokyo in August--and don't get me started on the mosquitoes. Doesn't that all sound like fun?)

But that doesn't stop me from doing some armchair overseas travel. I've started looking at hotels in Tokyo. Hopefully we will be well and truly out of this by next year. I would really like to see if my favorite kaiten sushi spot is still open in Ginza station.