HALLOWEEN STORY!

I am eager to return to my account of my visit to Tokyo. Yet, I feel the time is right to shift gears a little bit. This journal is designed for students of English, particularly those with an interest in American culture. So, I'd like to begin including stories, observations, etc. about life in the States.

A few years back--oh, I don't know, 9 or 10 years ago?--I took a group of international students to the Halloween Parade in the West Village. There were about ten of us in the group. If you're familiar with this parade, you know that it's one of New York's biggest (and craziest). We set out early to find a good spot in where we could see, but when we showed up, a ton of people were already there. One of the students was a Japanese teenager who was really shy in class; but he'd designed this incredible costume: he was a bottle of Coke! Everyone complimented him on it, but he hardly said anything back to them. He seemed embarrassed to be wearing it.

The parade began and hundreds of costumed people started marching, shouting, and dancing up 6th Avenue. One of the students was surprised to see that the people in the parade weren't part of some special group; they were just New Yorkers wearing Halloween costumes. "What do you have to do to be in the parade?" they asked me. "Nothing," I said. "You just need to be wearing a costume; you go down to Grand Street and just start walking up the avenue with everyone else."

Maybe a half hour or forty-five minutes later, I did a head count to make sure all of the students were still in the group. Someone was missing. Oh! The coke bottle! I started to panic. It didn't seem right that he would have walked away; could something have happened to him? I asked the other students, but no one had seen him leave. Then, all of a sudden, one of the students yelled, "Look!" There, in the middle of the parade, bobbing up and down to the music, was the coke bottle! It moved right past where we were standing and kept going, in a sea of people, up 6th avenue to Union Square.

Day 2

I managed to navigate my way from Mune's house to the train station (harder than you might think since I have an horrible sense of direction and I couldn't read any of the street signs!). My plan for the day: walk around Tokyo by myself. First, I checked out the Seiyu supermarket near the station. The fish and vegetables were so beautiful that I filmed them with my video camera! Then I went upstairs to the "general store" section, where I tried on a couple of hats. I bought some socks for my wife and was proud when I quickly counted out the correct change to give the cashier!

Before boarding the train, I bought some candy at the stand on the platform. One thing that I thought was grape gum turned out to be chewy grape taffy; another thing that I thought was lemon drops turned out to be little, soft sticky cubes of some other fruit-flavored candy. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to get the wrapper off of the sticky cube candy. It was so thin! I looked totally foolish on the train, of course, trying to peel the paper off of the candy (and remembering that eating on the train was a no-no). But I found out later that it had been even worse than I had thought: a friend of Mune's told me, "Oh, that old fashioned kind of candy? You're supposed to eat it with the paper on, not peel it off! How humiliating!

Guys having dinner in Shibuya