So Long, Tokyo

In memory of Rachel Greenberg, z”l, who loved travel in all its wonders and oddities.

Despite all the glamor of our gallivanting around the past few weeks, my last week in Tokyo was primarily logistical: moving suitcases, unpacking in my friend’s new apartment, running to the same grocery store half a dozen times for various supplies of one kind or another. We end as we started on this point: these too are valuable learning points, maybe even more so than the parks and the museums and the other fun stuff. I am enthralled, for example, with the drying function in my friend’s new shower room, where you can hang up laundry and leave it drying under blasting hot air for a few hours instead of having a dryer. (See below if you are interested in the various useful and perhaps less useful tricks of the trade I have picked up in the last month). And it was with no small amount of chagrin that I said farewell to our local coffee shop and bakery, both of which were small, unassuming, and of an excellence that we found nowhere else in Tokyo.

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