123. Cute animals – giraffes, monkeys, frogs – as construction barriers. (I listed them all for future search purposes, not because I don’t trust you to name them!)pic.twitter.com/BDQcfKUCWe
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134. One of my hotels (but only one) offered me a Smoke Guard and that made me worried more than anything else.pic.twitter.com/ofWym4wJx3
135. It wasn’t long after I got enough courage to try Oscillate when another restroom moved me up to face the next level’s final boss: Pulsate.pic.twitter.com/pYSrnuVIk8
136. But the one thing I *really* did not expect to find next to a toilet was… volume controls.pic.twitter.com/Pk3Ug8BoDp
137. Vending machines are truly ubiquitous, at 5½ million total (for 127M people). When I was biking through some rural areas near Hiroshima, I was astonished not just that they were there – but that I saw one every few minutes.pic.twitter.com/75FCTW6L6T
(But contrary to all the lore, outside of some cigarette machines, pretty much all that I saw were machines with liquids: cold and hot drinks. No vending machines with candy or weird stuff, unless they’re hiding somewhere I’m not looking?)pic.twitter.com/NoYJW07tQT
138. Getting the machine to give you back (the rest of) your money is such a fun great interaction on some of the models. First of all, there’s a big yellow lever to pull…pic.twitter.com/aU0hDlp4PP
Then, the machine counts down the money it owes you one coin at a time, which is REALLY satisfying. (Here, I put in 1,000¥ and ordered something worth 130¥.)pic.twitter.com/lfrV3IRVGr
Lastly, your change gets spat out at the very bottom, close to the ground, next to the delivered item. (Although I can’t decide whether that’s good. On one hand, it’s easy to grab with whatever you ordered – but also sometimes I forgot, and I had to reach further down again.)
139. This vending machine had a bottle opener and a little bucket for caps. It also had… mystery items! I saw that in other machines in that town, too. The last photo is what I got, because of course I had to try it out.pic.twitter.com/kgNl45vaRj
140. An incomplete list of surprising things I ordered that also tasted surprisingly well: – hot green tea – hot milk tea – hot corn souppic.twitter.com/QlDwB4CDvO
141. This is something that made me really happy yesterday. I love Stanisław Lem’s books enough that I sometimes have a dream where I go to a bookstore and find a stash of his books that I somehow never knew of.
(Which is impossible – I have all of his stuff – but you don’t question the logic of a dream in a dream. So I get really excited, and then equally sad when I wake up.)
When I travel abroad, I often try to find his books. He’s popular enough for it to be possible, but not *hyper* popular, so it’s still a challenge. I failed in a few bookstores here, hopelessly lost. I started doubting if Lem was even read in Japan. Was *any* hard sci-fi?
But I didn’t give up. And in another bookstore yesterday, I seeked help. I went to a machine, and somehow (no English UI) figured out how to search for books.
I typed in “Stanislaw” instead of the easily matched “Lem,” and I got some results! They all pointed to this section right next to me that looked like an entire case filled with hard sci-fi.pic.twitter.com/rZwStOBwM4
Since I cannot easily read a spine, I have to go through them one by one. And I eventually find one of Lem’s books! It’s a paperback of The Futorological Congress with a horrible cover harking back to a failed movie adaptation.pic.twitter.com/P4VtFgFSh3
I guess it’s good enough? I gather that all the other results in the database were just old and not updated, or maybe in different bookstores…
But then, just before leaving, I looked up. And there, in the upper right corner, I found an entire section of Lem’s books!!! I never looked for a ladder faster in my life. They were there, with Polish titles alongside Japanese ones! Apparently Lem *is* “big in Japan,” too.pic.twitter.com/KmXJ5m5MSm
I think this was the closest I ever been in real life to that recurring dream of mine. And so, I got three, including a paperback of Solaris, and a hard cover of Fiasco, which is my favourite book.pic.twitter.com/TI4OzU0fPE
The books are read right to left, and have that small wraparound band called “obi” that is, I believe, specific to Japan. I remember it from CDs and it was there on the record I bought yesterday. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Obi_(publishing) …pic.twitter.com/7V6SisilSS
So excited to have found them, and I’m actually going to try to read Fiasco! There are so many things here that perplex me: bolded bits and footnotes (neither present in the original). Chapters have their original Polish titles. There also seems to be a glossary at the end.pic.twitter.com/k8ZFZ3UXsI
Why are there two bar codes? (They actually scanned both.) Why is the text on the page split this way? It’s kind of incredible: this book that I have read so many times, appearing once again as a mysterious, unknown artifact.pic.twitter.com/vncGy32wHi
142. I found a bona fide train viewing area… and it wasn’t that hard to snap a photo with three different trains on it.pic.twitter.com/Js03UmD4jr
(I mean, look at these older trains on display at the museum. Those are some good-looking trains!)pic.twitter.com/cXJv1Vk1TN
143. How confident you have to be in your train network that your caveat is possibly about arriving somewhere *earlier*!?pic.twitter.com/CTMJAXUjEZ
144. There aren’t just millions of train toys. There are toys that are all about train infrastructure, like this car that transports train parts. <3pic.twitter.com/v6MsOaBsi9
…or other toys for “boring” transit options. I’d be exactly the kind of kid that’d get excited about “Midtown ticket counter.”pic.twitter.com/BhI0HyxmmJ
145. Speaking of transit infrastructure toys… here’s a gruesome dystopian vision that makes Cars feel like a kids movie.pic.twitter.com/OdBGvkMo5s
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