kodachrome

Excuse me, dear readers.  I have nothing new for you today.

You see, I've been spending lots of time on this here computer in the last few days; beating the heat and humidity indoors (with the air conditioning on full blast) and preparing to leave our honeymoon home.  We've accumulated quite a bit of stuff in this tiny little apartment over the last nine months, and now it is time to purge.  Everything must go.  And rather than kick it to the curb, we're hoping to sell it to another cute honeymooning couple looking for a variety of household items of superior design and quality who aren't interested in making a trip all the way out to IKEA.

I've made a website, posted pictures, and even met someone in Shinjuku (in front of the Gap, it's the BEST place to meet someone outside one of the busiest train stations in the world) to sell our coffee maker.  But fear not, we still have the espresso maker! We've got A LOT more to get rid of, though, so anyone in need of a printer, rice cooker, cheap shelving, or a lamp, come to Tokyo and you can have it cheap!

When I haven't been working on ridding our home of the comforts of modern living, I've spent quite a bit of time biking around our little town capturing images of the scenes and locations we want to remember when we head back to the States.  It will be hard to leave the place we've spent our first year of marriage, so we want to remember every street, store, and restaurant that have been such a big part of our daily lives.

And Tokyo is constantly changing - a building may be torn down with a new one put up in it's place in a month's time! - so it would be fun to see how different things may look when we come back to visit in a few years. 

I've also gotten to play with my new camera a bit, and take pictures of the blooming flowers that, amazingly, can be seen all over the city.  Individual people take the time to cultivate them in public spaces.  And no one cuts them down or destroys them!  Hard for an American to believe.

I think this is a gardenia.  Anyone want to back me up here?

I could smell this thing about 10 feet away if that's any help. 

And, I think this is a hydrangea.  They were formed into almost perfect balls.

And in order to illustrate just how humid it has been here in Tokyo, there are water droplets on the leaves of these plants and it didn't rain today!  Ok, I grant that these flowers may have been watered recently, but I'm telling you, you don't know humidity until you've endured an east Asian rainy season.


Jeff's been a busy bee too.  He's finishing up a paper he will deliver tomorrow (nothing like the last minute, huh?) and has been furiously typing away and monopolizing the small table space we have all week.  I am so excited to go and watch him speak!  Of course, I say that now....  Don't worry, I'll have some coffee first!  There will be yummy Indian food after though, did I mention that :) ?

So that's all I have to report, not so exciting I know.  But we have something BIG in the works for next week, so stay tuned!

Mata ne,
Melissa