Hello from Tokyo (11:35 am) – I arrived here at about 5 pm local time last night (actually sat next to and talked with a lady on the Shinkansen who used to live in San Francisco until about 15 or so years ago – she gave me some tips on sights to see and shops to take a peek in… apparently her boyfriend and I have similar interests and he was from the Baltimore area too, so she offered to ask him if he would be able to show me around some of the more electronic / computer districts of Tokyo on the weekend, but I said that unfortunately I wouldn’t be able to because I’m leaving the city on Friday. She gave me her email address so I could contact her about the name of a specific electronic store that she thought that I might like to see, since she and I were

both interested in handheld PDAs. I was even able to send to her PDA a program I had on mine for finding out directions from one subway stop to another which she thought was very useful.)

Last night I wandered around Ginza, which is the ritzy section of

Tokyo, and looked at all of the buildings and poked my head into

different stores. When I got tired I headed to the capsule hotel to spend the night. The manager on duty there spoke english and showed me on a chart how to operate the controls for the tv that were in my capsule. The sleeping capsule was about the size of a telephone booth tipped on its side, with a tv, a radio, and a clock built in. It also had a shade you could draw closed when you were ready to sleep.

Today so far I went to the Tokyo International Forum (a big confrence center – looks like today there’s a toy expo in the meeting halls) back in Ginza, because I read that there was free internet access (which I’m using now) in the cultural information center here, and I needed to confirm my reservations at the ryokan and the youth hostel.

Probably next I’m going to find the Sony Building, where they’ve got all sorts of demos of different products they’ve made or prototyping right now, and search for the Gainax store and Anna Miller’s restaurant since I had found directions to them. XD