I Was Told There Would Be Ninjas.

     Greetings, Brave Traveller! If you've come here to find out about your two favorite people, Carisa Barreca and Kevin Sciretta, and their trip to Tokyo, Japan, then by golly you've come to the right place. If you haven't, why on Earth are you still reading this? Go have a sandwich or something. The rest of us have work to do. 

     

     By work, I mean prep for the trip, which at this point is equal parts assembling necessary items and baggage, as well as mentally coming to grips with the fact that by this time tomorrow, we will be on the other side of the Earth. Carisa is pretty seasoned at this sort adventure. She's been to Tokyo before, as well as London and a hundred other places because every time someone sneezes, her family celebrates with a cruise. The furthest I've ever been from home was Cartagena, Columbia, which by my recollection was 7 feet from the surface of the Sun. That's it. I've been to Canada, Mexico and the Caribbean, but come on. Do those really count as foreign countries at this point? I submit that they do not.

     I should brief you on how this trip came to be. I had nothing to do with it. Zero. Carisa and I had talked about where we would go if we ever had the chance to travel abroad and I mentioned Tokyo because to me, it would be the closest thing to going to a different planet. Different culture, people, architecture, language. It would be stepping into a whole other version of life as we know it. So, we booked a week-long trip to Tokyo and by "we",  I mean she did all the planning and I nodded and said "Yes" a lot. Ta-da! Tokyo!

     

     Everything I know about Tokyo comes from popular culture. To my understanding,  we will be able to drift Honda Civics between warring gangs of mutant yakuza, at which point Uma Thurman will show up and kill everyone with a samurai sword, all while a fire-breathing dinosaur fights a gigantic moth. Sumo wrestlers will serve us raw fish made by a talking panda. All subway trains can combine to form one giant subway train, and that giant train knows karate. The mayor is Sonny Chiba. Everyone is a robot. 

      So. It should be fucking awesome.

     What I'm Looking Forward To the Most: Everything. If I had to pick, it would be going to a baseball game at the Tokyo Dome, because I've wanted to do that ever since I was a kid. Seeing baseball in the most famous stadium outside the United States? Yes, please.

      What I'm Looking Forward to the Least: The 13-hour flight. I hate almost everything about flying. I used to be great at it, but a few years ago I took a choppy flight from Chicago to New York sitting next to a lunatic, and my brain decided "Nope, you hate this." I have spent the last two days gathering entertainments, so I should be sufficiently medicated/alcoholed/distracted. 

     More tonight as we pack and prepare, and pictures to come. 

 

     Until then.

    - KMS