fresh fish/fast internet

Oh my, how addicted I am to high-speed internet connections. I'm at the Apple store in the Ginza shopping district with my friends Janelle and Fernando. They have free internet they let us use, which is excellent. Also, I'm not sleepy, although I woke up this morning at 2:45 am (I got out of bed at 3:00am, but have been wide awake since 2:45), which is also remarkable.

This morning, we went to the Tsujiki Fish Market, perhaps the largest fish market in the world. We left the hotel at 4:45am (the big tuna auction begins at Tsujiki at 5:00) and took the subway over to the market. What an experience! Someone yesterday put it well, that you really get an idea of how big the world is by seeing all these fish- caught the night before- in one place. At the tuna auction, there are all these giant frozen tuna (mostly without heads) on wooden palates on the ground, and in very fast Japanese, a man auctions them off to small companies who sell the meat to restaurants, sushi shops, etc. The fish are HUGE! We're talking hundreds of pounds...I'll post a pic when I get back to the hotel. After someone buys the fish, these guys with big fish hooks drag the fish onto a crate and wheel it off to its new home.

The best part of the morning, though, was the sushi I had for breakfast! There were these men cutting up the tuna into strips to package to sell to sushi shops. I asked them (in bad Japanese and bad English) if they knew where I could get some sushi to eat. They proceeded to cut some strips off of several different types of fish, put them in a plastic box, drizzled them with soy sauce, handed me chopsticks, and I ate the best sushi of my life. When I asked them how much I owed them, they told me nothing. How great is that!?!?

The people of Japan are very kind, friendly, and helpful overall. People have helped us buy subway tickets, find where we're going, given us free sushi... even though we don't really know Japanese and some of them don't really know English. It's amazing how people can be helpful and kind to one another when they can't even understand one another...we could probably all learn a lesson from that.

Well, I think we're going to go find something to eat for dinner. More soon!