October 18, Thursday

Thursday, October 18

Early this morning, at 5:00, I met a group of people in the hotel lobby and we ventured out to the local fish market. This market supplies 90% of the fish sold in Tokyo. They eat a lot of fish here, so you know many fish pass through this market. We rode the metro or subway which was a pretty good accomplishment in itself. Luckily, I tagged along with some people who are really great at figuring out the complexities of metro schedules and we had no problems at all.

The fish market is a huge place where they bring in fresh fish of all kinds and either auction or sell them outright. It shows another side of Tokyo that I hadn’t seen yet. This is one of the places where you see a bit of the heart and soul of the average Japanese at work. They work fast and furious filleting fish for sale (if you don’t watch out you will get run over by men driving small vehicles loaded down with fish), bargaining for the best price and then preparing them for shipping to all parts of the world. We saw someone from Ireland at the auction buying tuna that will be shipped to his country by tomorrow. All kinds of fish are sold. We saw enormous blue fin tuna, octopus, eel, oysters, and many others that I did not recognize. The people who work here obviously work hard day in and day out. When I ate fish for breakfast this morning I thought of the hard labor by the many people that it took to bring it to my plate.

Speaking of breakfast, a typical Japanese breakfast is very different from ours. It seems more like what we might eat for lunch or dinner than for breakfast. They offer items such as green salad with cucumber and tomato, a cabbage salad, many kinds of fruit, fish, pickled radishes and cucumbers, bean salad, boiled rice, soup, small cucumber sandwiches. It is very delicious (oishii). I am thankful they also offer coffee which I have desperately needed because of jet lag.

The girls in the above photo were on the subway and on their way to school. They were intently practicing reading English. We saw their handwriting and it was absolutely perfect!

Japan is an epicenter for earthquakes. Right now they are overdue for a large earthquake so they told us what to do if one occurred while we were in our hotel room. Our rooms are equipped with a flashlight and most have helmets. If there is an earthquake we are to take the flashlight, put on the helmet and duck and cover under something solid. Sounds funny to us who are not used to earthquakes, but because they have had big earthquakes in the past, they take it all very seriously.

Just in case you think this trip is all play, it is not. We do excursions into the city on our ‘free’ time – early morning or evening. Our days and many evenings, too, are totally scheduled with seminars or classes on Japanese life. Today we listened to many important Japanese dignitaries speak about the education and government in Japan.

On Sunday I fly with 15 others to Kagoshima which is in the very southern portion of Japan. We will spend a week there visiting schools and we will each stay overnight with a Japanese host family. I still have the cranes and plan to give them to school children in Kagoshima.

Right now, it is 2:00 in the middle of the night in Tokyo and in Montana it is about 11:00 Thursday morning. My body seems to be listening to its own internal clock and not the clock on the wall!

I'm having trouble putting labels or captions with my photos, so you'll have to follow along as best as you can. Sorry about that. Talk to you again soon!