A little more on the side please

With a few more days under the belt you'd think that I'd be running out of new stuff to tell you all about. Nope. Fat chansu. It turns out that every once and a while you will run into a lady wearing a kimono. Truth. Today I way three. One on the subway (of all places) and then two that emerged from what looked like a very nice hotel. I bowed to one of them and she smiled and bowed back! けっこいいね。Buses here come basically once an hour (unless you are going to Myoken-cho cuz then they're like every 15 seconds). There are yellow tiles on the sidewalks all around Nagoya that I had taken to be like decoration for the longest time but nay, they are actually guiding tools for the blind. I guess the city of Nagoya is just so nice -- or the people are so cold --- that they put those tiles there to help the less fortunate. The style of dress here, while we're talking about Kimonos 着物 is very fashion conscious but stuck, as a certain Phil pointed out, in the 80s (for the most part). We decided that, and this actually applies to multiple categories of style and purpose, that they Japanese just loved the 80s so much that they are having real trouble letting go of it. For example the girls and guys are always seen with very tall, poofy hair that goes in many a direction; the girls wear high boots with short skirts and the guys wear skimpy, multicolored vests that are a couple sizes too big with pointy elf shoes; computer machinery and many of the buildings of Nagoya and Nanzan are still stuck in the 80s with very few real modern pieces of equipment--hell, they're still have the option of not only using a tape recorder in the listening space, but (get this) a floppy disk for their e-mail service. Floppys get like a third of a magabyte of storage! It's really a turned around society in that respect: some aspects of life are really modern (cell phones), many are stuck in the 80s (vests??), and then there are other aspects of life that still live on from ancient times (Kimono on the subway), all in all they make up this society of people who see themselves as a special, unique culture that is moving and changing like the current in the ocean but who's culture and background remains in a constant ebb and flow with the oncoming future like the tide on the shore. I'm just floating on the surface it seems...
still loving the starfish...