There's something about Tokyo that can reduce the most confident--heck, even the most arrogant--visitor to a shaking pile of uncertain jelly. Ever since I arrived yesterday, I've been having the strangest cognitive dissonance. On the one hand, this isn't anything new for me: I've lived in Japan before, and while my language skills have declined somewhat, I can still make my way around town, and generally make myself known. But all the small details that I used to have mastered are gone.

For instance, take the art of the introduction. It took me a very long time during my first visit to get the whole Japanese introduction system down pat: who bows, how low, what you say, and most importantly, when you stop bowing, since I have a tendency to just keep going. Over the last few days I've probably been through thirty introductions, and I'm back to the gawky-kid stage. The problem is, I can almost be the gawky kid right now, and I've stumbled no few of them.

On the other hand, I spent the morning away from the office (most of which I can't really talk about), waiting for my luggage to arrive from the airport delivery service, and ran into a pleasant surprise. Although I'm sure the Clerk will disagree in his normal curmudgeonly fashion, the lower tendency for Japanese to sue means that the coffee that I purchased at McDonalds this morning was the proper temperature: hot. And while it might seem strange to have eaten my first breakfast in a foreign land in a McDonalds, let me remind you of two major differences between McDonalds in Tokyo and New York: the former are both clean and capable of serving food hot.

Anyway, I've settled into an apartment in Ikebukuro, and if I can find some free wireless access points and have time over the weekend, I'll be putting up a photoblog, which with any luck will fill with my pictures of my summer here. In the meantime, I'll have to go: my time at this internet cafe is almost...