All the cats are huge and all the dogs are small

I have to travel an hour every day both to and from school. This hour is spent on the trains. Presupposing I dont go anywhere else, when in reality I almost double this train time daily, that makes for 2 hours a day. Two hours a day, 5 days a week. 10 hrs a week, 4 weeks a month. 40 hours a month times 3 months I am here is 120 hours.

I will spend at least 120 hours on a train while I am here, just by going to class.

Now in reality, I would estimate that number to actually be somewhere around 290 or 300 hours I will spend on the train, since everything in Tokyo is far apart, and everything is at least an hour from my dorm. Plus I get confused often and take the wrong trains.

Trains are how its done in Tokyo. Cars are expensive, unpractical and a little silly looking, to be frank. My local train station, in Japanese "eki", is about a mile from my dorm. Every morning that ten minute walk takes me past one fruit stand. This fruit stand contains the largest cat I have ever seen. I would estimate it to be around 40 pounds or so. Ironically, the owners of the stand own a small pomeranian dog, which is dwarfed by the car.

Every day I walk past this cat, I have to fight the urge to not run over and grab it and tell it that it leads a wholly unhealthy and unreasonable lifestyle, and needs to settle down lest it be doomed to a future of heart problems or feline diabetes.

The trains here are on time. To the minute, literally. You can set your watch by the tokyo train system. The only time the trains ran late, was when I was supposed to meet Ikuko at a Doves concert, and I was almost late.

I feel this less to be the trains fault, and more god's overriding hatred of me.

Being a foreigner on the train is much fun. The majority of rides, you and your friends will be the only non-Japanese people on the train and this often affords you a halo of free space as people are unsure how such an odd looking specimen will react when cornered. I should probably be embarassed, but I secretly love being able to get the extra space, and try to look extra indimidating to ensure it.

The trains are extremely crowded in Tokyo. Extremely crowded. Extrem.....sorry I just really needed to emphasize that. Japan has about half the population of the USA in an area less than the size of California. A large portion of that is confined to the one city of Tokyo. The trains, as a result, are often ass to ankles. This also has to do with the Japanese, as a people, refusing to ever admit to themselves a train is full. I have seen people wait outside the train doors until they begin to shut, in order to use the doors as leverage to push the people further in to the train.

The seats on the train are highly valuable, seeing as how there are only about 50 to a car, and often 250 people or more in a train car. Speculating on when they will open up is a science. You have to take in to account things such as age, gender, amount of belongings and general disposition when choosing to stand near a desired seat. Nothing feels worse than waiting for 15 minutes next to a seat, watching others farther away be opened up and taken, than to see that person suddenly fall asleep, indicating they're not going anywhere soon.

I take that back. What feels worse is when a seat opens up, and an elderly person looks at it, and then at you, and you give it to them out of guilt. I often wonder whether the annoyance of standing outweighs the guilt of shoving aside an octogenarian.

At night, the trains are filled with drunk 'salary men', passed out or red eyed, mixed in with the hip kids of Japan going home after a night of partying. Cars are much livelier then, compared to the dead silence of a day time train ride. At least at night, judging by drunken stares and sullen glances, I'm not the only one who feels out of place.

Japan is a beast, and the trains are its arteries.
I am a piece of dirt that got in a cut.

More on trains another day, right now I have to go seperate my trash in to 5 piles,
~karl arthur