Ramblings

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Have not written in a while as I have been travelling with my parents. Have been missing Cam as usual now that it has turned out they can not let him travel to Japan for one reason or another. Have been trying to teach myself how to deal with my feelings for him on another more controlled level as I:ve come to learn that what Shina said when I told her even in a good mood Cam managed to drive me crazy, her comment was "he always does that" and it is true. I love Cam but I do not want to drive him or myself crazy by not keeping those feelings under control. Have been taking care of my parents - or doing my best to under the circumstances of travelling (which are extremely difficult ones for them). I think - and hope they had a great time meeting my friends and seeing where I live. Unfortunately we went through the insanity of Chinese travelling once again (for me) with the great rooms and the horrible meals that try to always sell you something else. Typical Chinese touring. We did not get a chance to experience Japanese travelling as for whatever reason some stupid travel agent decided it was a smart idea to take a handicapped person on a tour around the city on a bus with four stairs up to the seat (stupid idiot). Fortunately I think it worked out well int he end as we got to go to some really great restaurants and travel around on our own time. We tried to go into the Tokyo Metropolitan Museum of Art but it did not work very well as you have bto pay about 7 dollars for each individual floor (although despite this I have still decided to try one more museum before leaving tomorrow). I have personally fallen in love with the small Japanese alleyways (which my father also loved and the zillions of Japanese signs up and down the buidlings showing all the places on each individual floor - the Japanese are some of the best space savers in the world. It is strange because sometimes when I am travelling here I feel really shy like I should be a nice polite little girl in girlie clothes and sometimes I feel like I want to scream and yell. The first comes from the people who are nice and the second from people like the taxi drivers who drive away when they see a handicapped person (which is not all of them just a few) or things llike the connection of the metro lines which look like they should connect easily and then make you go out of the metro and back in thereby making you buy 2 tickets and pay double. Yes, I am back to waht dad would call the cheapskate position where I am enraged to have to pay 3 dollars to go 5 stops on the metro ()when it would be about 20 in a taxi). Fortunately it is also much faster to take the metro than a taxi as there is no "traffic" so to speak or "red lights" as we think of them. I have to say I still HATE not being able to speak the langauge. Sometimes I am good with the phrasebooks and I can read some of the signs due to my Chinese but they do not use simplified Chinese characters here so that makes reading a bit difficult and I obviously can not speak Japanese as well as Chinese nor can I understand it even as much as Nepali. It is getting cold now and I have been trying to buy some warmer clothes but everything is either insanely expensive or does not fit me. I know this may sound strange but in this city I do not understand the concept of a poor person. A poor person here would have enough money to own a country in Africa - everything is SO expensive (the cheapest room I could find in Tokyo was 37 dollars about twice as expensive as Nepal and 3 times as much as China). On a different note Japanese people are really stylish - although I am not sure I could sport their style. I went aroiund today checking out some shopping in Asakusa and Ikebukuro areas (two places I had not been to with my parents) although I did not find all too much but some fun presents. Finished out of my books I bought this morning - manga is too easy to breeze through, I may have to buy more books.

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