everybody kept saying "lost in translation!" when they heard i am going to tokyo and with a only a smattering of japanese words and one complete sentence (sumi masen, eki wa dokodesuga? excuse me, where is the train station?) in my head it could have been like that, but in fact my three days in metropolitan tokyo was free of blunders and somehow disappointing because predictable because although every large city is not exactly like any other every large city is still very much the same thing. we stayed in a very nice 21st storey apartment in nakano, right next to sun plaza and mere minutes' from the nakano station (exceedingly convenient, being on the jr system chuo line.) took a day tour to various shrines and gardens and also a short cruise of the tokyo bay area, did some window shopping in shinjuku and shibuya, and met a cute japanese guy on the steps of the asakusa temple only he couldn't speak english or chinese and i couldn't speak japanese and after gesturing at each other a little we gave up and smiled apologetically and went our separate ways. which makes one wonder why people make you memorise useless things like "where is the police box" or "how much does that cost" or even "the apron of the gardener's aunt" when what they should have taught you was "wait what's your phone number?" went to the market street outside asakusa and felt like my mother 30 years ago walking down the same street only then it was spring and sprigs of sakura hung overhead now summery green boughs. bought card cases and purses of the sort kokontozai in singapore sold with poach in mind and had some oyako don in a small restaurant on a side street when i got tired, oyako-don because it was the only thing on the menu that was in kanji.

but what i loved was not metropolitan tokyo but the small city of abiko, slightly under two hours' drive from the centre of the city of tokyo, where we stayed with friends of my mother in a traditional japanese house, and loved every moment of it. at breakfast, given rice balls, japanese-style sweetened egg, tomato, sliced lady's finger, roast brinjal in soy sauce, sweetened pickled gourd, pickled cucumber, fresh cucumber, corn on cob...and they all turned out to be home-grown and home-prepared. "except the eggs," our host explained. i eyed the riceballs. but surely you don't grow your own rice? and they did! so we drove out to see their padi field, which was slightly smaller than a football field. and we got a garden tour: melon, peach, yam, maize, cucumber, chili, red beans (in long, curved pods,) groundnuts, tomato, eggplant, lady's finger... they aren't even farmers but businessmen who commute to tokyo each day, and the gardening is by the way, since they have some land, and the grandmother of the family tends the growing singlehandedly. they exchange gifts of fruits and vegetables with their neighbours to supplement what they don't grow, so there is always fresh produce on the table. (one evening we had a massive and extremely sweet watermelon from the neighbours that would have delighted su-lin and left jamie oliver speechless)

and they asked if i had ever ridden a horse. no, never, i replied. this puzzled me terribly because in singapore you go to the zoo to see a horse, and our host knows this, having studied in nanyang u. i have never so much as come near a horse, and until i saw a policeman in d.c., hadn't seen one off television. that's when i find out our hostess's family used to raise horses. they sold the farm years back, but everyone in the family rides beautifully. so they took me for my first riding lesson. (i was completely hopeless at it, but that is a different story....)