Photos: Kyoto garden near temple, tea ceremony, Buddha in Tokyo.


I explore Tokyo and Kyoto using the public transit systems. The subways are pristine, efficient, fast, and very quiet. The Japanese barely speak during their commutes. I know that their poor social skills account for a high suicide rate, but I am reveling in their stillness. Silence is gold.

This is a welcome shift from New York. Back in New York, I am over stimulated to the point where I couldn’t always hear myself. On any given day, I could be in my Queens neighborhood where I am surrounded by my southern Italian neighbors speaking in some sort of Napolitano dialect that I barely understand, the young fashionable Greeks in the sidewalk cafes showing off, Brazilians melodically chatting and the Bosnians barking at each other about nothing. If the subway is running that day and not re-routed for some unexpected reason, I would meet some freaks, homeless people, vendors selling candy bars on subway cars, and maybe an elderly Russian couple grumpily discussing the day’s news and welfare payments. In Manhattan, I could be in a café with Argentines on a melodramatic rampage about liposuction, a Type A Wall Street banker madly speaking into his mobile phone, and lost French tourists. All of those characters make for a quintessentially New York experience, but with the exception of my Greek fashionistas and Southern Italians, I understand everyone at the same time. I am overwhelmed with the amount of information coming to me from strangers. It is too much. My brain is on overdrive processing all these different grammatical and semantic structures.

While in Japan, I don’t crave meat like I did walking the streets of New York where I sniffed the cooking skewers of chicken and beef like a dog. I become calm. I hear myself. Being unable to read the Japanese street signs does facilitate my getting lost, but I love not understanding the spoken and oral language. I do not have to fight to filter out waves of words flooding my brain. I can just be. The only time I communicate is in Russian at my cousin’s house in the morning before I leave and in the evenings when I come home. Some people are terrified about being in a country where they can’t communicate, but I am loving it.

Ignorance is bliss.

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