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Cabbage patch feet

One of the first and most important purchases that I've made has been my sweat towel. Oh, yes. Luckily they sell them EVERYWHERE and I've now fully embraced the old man brow wipe. Expect to see me carrying one around from now on. They sell wipes with patterns that look like small towel and fancier ones of linen or cotton with beautiful screen prints on them called tenugui. Not all bathrooms have paper towels, so the tenugui are also used to dry your hands.

Japanese bathrooms tend to go to two different extremes. You either get modern robot toilets or the traditional japanese style where you pee over a trench. Both have their ups and downs. I can't help but be unsettled everytime I sit down on a pre-heated seat. Back home a warm public toilet seat is unpleasant to say the least.

Our first official day in Tokyo was filled with lots of almost missed trains, smothering heat, fat feet and vending machines. Jet leg does weird things to people and I experienced two very significant affects, waking up at 3:30 am and cabbage patch feet. When I travel it's not uncommon for my sleep to get all kinds of messed up and getting up at 3:30 am seemed to be about normal. However, this feet swelling things is totally new to me. I've never experienced my legs and feet swelling from travel though I know it's a thing that can happen. Most of the shoes that I brought wouldn't fit my huge swollen piggy feet. I tried at one point to put my pants on which resulted in a humorous and pathetic effort to force them over my heavily swollen calfs, Oof.

We had a bunch of appointments for our first day and it started early and was quickly filled with mayhem. Dealing with public transit at home can be frustrating, having to get 8 people from point A to B can be chaotic, but trying to do those things in in Tokyo is a total different story. To be far to Japan, everything is amazingly organized and lots of things are in english but that didn't keep our day from being filled with crazy running americans trying desperately to get to their train on time.

We started our tour of Japan design at Suntory, which is similar to the japanese equilvalent of Coca-Cola, where we met with some of the designers and discussed agile project management and the history of products. We then went to a beautiful small design studio named Draft. We rounded out the day with a fantastic lecture by a former PSU student that now teaches in Japan about the history of graphic design in japan.

Tokyo is a lot different than I thought it was going to be and honestly I was a little hesitant at first that I was going to like it. After being around the city for a few days, it's a lot more mellow than I would have thought, though there is it's far share of neon to go around.

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