day 12: denwa

Each time we enter a new hotel room, one of the first orders of business is to unplug the phone so that toby doesn’t bankrupt us by calling argentina. This means that either we are unable to receive calls, or can only receive them on the phone in the bathroom. Until a few days ago, this didn’t matter at all since no one, perhaps with the exception of a toddler playing with a hotel phone in argentina, has tried to call us. Now, we seem to get a lot of calls. Jon’s parents call every day or so to make sure we’re all still fine. And in addition, our good friend mrs. N calls us once or twice a day. Often, she calls when we’re gone or not standing in the bathroom. This results in the front desk having to print out a piece of paper telling us her message, which is usually just that she called and hopes we are well, and slip it under our door. We now have a stack of these papers in our room. toby of course likes to eat them. In addition, today we received a package from her of candies and other goodies, mostly because during one of the times when jon answered the phone and spoke to her, he mentioned that we were looking for a specific kind of candy to bring home as omiage. sadly, the candies she sent were not the candies we were looking for, but we sure do have a lot of them. Having never been stalked by an elderly Japanese woman, I found all of this quite exciting, and lamented that jon had not told her we were looking for something more unusual, perhaps a pet fugu or a small elephant. It inspires me to plug in the phone, at least until toby gets Sweden on the line.

Today we went to the imperial palace. It was hot and sunny and there were lots of spiders. Then, perhaps feeling a bit of withdrawl, we headed to Tokyo station for lunch, which is, yes you guessed it, a high-end shopping center. Toby played with some other children until he got sleepy. as he napped in the backpack, we headed to Tokyo midtown for some coffee and dessert. He awoke while we were there and lead some old ladies in a clapping exercise. As you’ll see in this video, I think he has a future as a guitarist for the kind of stadium playing band that stops playing to clap their hands over their heads and encourage the crowd to clap along. rock on!