Laundry . Departure

There are a bunch of quaint, Superman-type phone booths in Japan. I mean the type that Clark Kent rushes into and emerges as Superman. I find myself in one that Thursday morning, musing over this thought as I fumble with my phone card and try to dial home. I press a wrong button and wind up with a phone tree menu in Spanish, which I struggle through and successfully navigate to connect my call, despite an atrophied Spanish lexicon after having had 11 years to forget the three years I had spent on it during junior high and high school.

There is only one place in your mind for foreign language, I decided, because when I began learning Japanese my Spanish began suffering. At times when I would reach for words in Spanish I'd come up with the Japanese, and vice versa. Once in Japanese class the teacher asked the verb for "to come", and I said "venir". She and the rest of the class looked at me funny, and the entire class knew what mistake I had made, because nearly everyone had taken Spanish before. From what I hear, new languages are represented in an area of cortex adjacent to primary language cortex, or sometimes mapped right on top of existing language cortex.

It's morning and I had taken a break from laundry to call loved ones at home to let them know that I'm OK and that we'd be in Hong Kong by the end of the day. I left my load of clothes at a nearby tiny laundromat a block away from our hotel. The laundromat consists of about four washing machines and four dryers in a cramped little room. No one staffs the place. There are dispensers for detergent; the boxes have designs and fonts that resemble America's brands such as "Tide" or "All". It's funny how all detergent boxes look alike even in radically different languages. Quoc and Ants were also doing their laundry, intermittently taking breaks to go to the 7-11 or Lawson's, taking turns to watch the laundry. As if anyone would steal our clothes in Japan... but we had all of our luggage with us, after checking out of the hotel room earlier in the day, and losing them, however small the chance, would have been disastrous.

We're sitting out there chatting in front of the laundromat, chewing on some buns bought at the convenience stores, when this middle-aged lady comes by to do her laundry. We're talking in English and she notices. Soon she asks us, in pretty good English, where we're from and what we're doing in Japan. We tell her we were just vacationing. She relaxes and tells us that she spends a lot of her time in Hawaii, and that she's a mix of Chinese and Japanese. She leans casually against the propped open door and lights a cigarette. She asks us what we did, and we smile and say the standard things... we visited temples, saw the city, went to Yokohama, and went clubbing. "So did you meet any Japanese girls?" she asks with a wry smile. We're a bit surprised by her forwardness, but I've noticed that oftentimes the Japanese can become rather blunt when not in a formal situation or when they are relaxed. I suppose the contrast is what makes it more noticeable. No, we say, we did not meet Japanese girls. "You should just go up and talk to them! You've gotta have GUTS!" she emphasizes, implying that they are passive recipients waiting for prince charmings to sweep them off of their feet. We smirk at each other upon hearing this, somehow feeling slightly embarrassed. So that's what it takes... "GUTS!"

We finish our laundry and drag our luggage with us to the subway station. We travel to Ueno station where we take an express train back to the airport. I don't remember much about the ride to the airport, except that we had to deboard a few stops away from the airport for some reason; the train just wasn't taking everyone to the airport. At that stop we bought some more pastry buns and waited for the next train. It was a sunny day, and the light had taken on a slightly orange hue as our afternoon shadows lengthened. The remote station was pretty quiet. The orange light seemed somehow appropriate, reminding me of a lazy Sunday afternoon in Southern California. Although we had Hong Kong ahead of us, I didn't particularly want to leave Japan. It would be nice if those orange afternoons lasted longer, but perhaps the transience of the late afternoon sun and the anticipation of the week ahead are what make them seem especially sweet.

That was how our trip went. Thanks for reading about it.