Tuesday, March 03, 2015

second heartbeat

I'm overlooking downtown Tokyo from my room on the fiftieth floor of its highest tower, enjoying the lights on my last night in Asia. It would have been way better if I'd spent a week in Japan and two days in India, but beggars (or corporate drones) can't be choosers, so I guess I'll have to come back here sometime and take a proper vacation...

...but proper vacations will have to wait (and anyway, this year's proper vacation is already committed to my spinster honeymoon in May). Today was about work - not that I slogged all that hard, since I didn't get to the office until ten, but it was work nonetheless. I woke up at a reasonable hour and spent the first forty-five minutes awake getting ready while fielding conversations with the people back at the day job - they were awake and at work then, which made for the first almost-decent overlap since I left (India is completely not conducive to coordination with California). Then I had breakfast with Lillian before walking to the office.

The office is really nice, as it turns out; they moved buildings sometime after I was here in 2010, and the space is lovely. They have a bunch of entirely strange, quintessentially Japanese vending machines (free, of course) in the microkitchens, and I enjoyed drinking whatever I was able to order out of them. Their lunch cafe was also really delightful (if you like Japanese food, which I mostly do). And I had a bunch of mostly-productive meetings, with time to catch up on email in between.

I was going to sneak out at the end of the day to make a pilgrimage to a seven-story stationery store in Shinjuku, but I miscalculated and got caught by my coworker, who wanted to have dinner. She agreed to go to the stationery store with me, but we came back to the hotel first, and ended up just shopping and having dinner in the mall here. Dinner was pretty nice; it was some sushi place that was decent (food in malls here isn't anything like food in malls in the US), with one Americanish waiter who was clearly hired specifically to deal with people like us. And while I didn't buy any stationery (the one stationery store in the mall was an Itoya, and there's an Itoya on Union Street in SF that carries most of the same merchandise), I did find a pretty cute tote bag, so at least it wasn't a total bust.

We parted ways relatively early, and then I spent the evening packing, relaxing, and continuing to catch up on email. And now, I shall get as much sleep as possible so I can survive my final day of work/travel before going home...goodnight!

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