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Weather: rainy
Breakfast @ my brother's
Lunch: Shumai @ Chinese restaurant in Ikebukuro
Dinner: Hokke set dinner at a restaurant in Ikebukuro

I attained one of my goals for my trip to Japan: I bought two pairs of jeans that fit me at a store called Uniqlo.

Uniqlo is a Japanese clothing store where they sell inexpensive but hip clothes,; a Japanese version of American Eagle or the Gap. I have been buying jeans there for the past few years because I can always find my size, and also because they alter the length free of charge, right on the spot.

Mark cannot sit still when he goes shopping with me, and he usually helps me pick out clothes. Even here in Tokyo, he was bringing new items into the fitting room.

I could sense that a clerk was looking at us accusingly; her eyes were saying, “You cannot try on more than three items at one time.” I could also see that she was not going to say anything mainly because he was a “gaijin” (foreigner.) What did I do? I ignored her stare, and behaved as though I was also an ignorant foreign accomplice.

For lunch we went to a small Chinese restaurant near Ikebukuro station. Mark ordered “Yasai itame” (saut?ed vegetables), but a giblets dish was brought out by mistake. (He asked for a replacement, of course.) The waiter was from China and he obviously did not understand our Japanese. Tokyo is gradually becoming a melting pot, just like other big cities around the world.