46. Tokyo II, June 2000

Somchai came along on business trips to Tokyo a few times. This was the first, and they start to get repetitive so it will also be the last in this blog. As you can see, he really took to the Japanese way of life, and I think he may have been a geisha in a previous life. He's standing inside our room at the Park Hyatt Tokyo, probably my favorite city hotel in the world. He's wearing the hotel bathrobe, and, hard to see but totally ridiculous, these wooden clog-like things, which are planks of wood supported on two vertical planks for no particular reason other than to make it very hard to balance on them. They're ugly, uncomfortable, impossible to walk in and really loud. Somchai saw them at an outdoor market and had to have them, saying he'd wear them all the time. So this picture is important since it's the first and last time I've ever seen them.