Ahh...Japan...

One of the things I will miss most about Tokyo is the noise. Not the too many people crammed into a space that's way too small and all of them driving around at once kind of noise but the strange noise. For example, the trucks that drive around my neighbourhood all day blaring strange music or recorded messages from loudspeakers on the tops of their trucks, selling things or offering services.

Some of them are loud and scary and make me want to throw things at them but most of them are really funny and occasionally really beautiful. A truck just went by playing this beautiful, haunting music that sounded like an old fashioned music box and I can still kind of hear strains of it as it circles the block (lots of one way streets make for lots of block circling) and it makes me feel nostaligic for something or some place I don't even remember. It's great. Sometimes they sing as they drive to tell people what they're selling and sometimes it's just the music. Different pieces of music mean different things that only the people who grew up here understand. It's something that's so different from home that I think it will always stick in my memory. One of my person favourites is this strange, warped carnival music that makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up everytime I hear it. It's so bizarre and creepy for me as a westerner but nobody else seems to notice. I think they were selling tofu. Maybe. I can't remember. Everytime I hear it I have visions of horribly deformed clowns popping out from the back of the truck weilding long, curvy knives. And yes, this is one of my favourites. I've said it before, and I'll say it again, I'm a strange animal. :-)

I think I'll be posting a lot of these memory style posts over the next month. I guess I'm hoping that recording my thoughts now will help me to be able to remember everything once I've gone. It's been a really interesting experience living here and I don't want all of my thoughts and feelings about the rest of what's going on to crowd out the memories of the place itself. So bear with me. Soon enough I'll be posting scathing descriptions of "the island" and it's colourful inhabitants in my customary bitchy, I mean funny, yeah... funny, manner.