On air con fears and the appeal of skirts

I have this weird love-hate relationship with the air conditioning here. Today was roughly 29 degrees out at its hottest, so all day it was pretty sweltering. I get home, I'm exhausted, and I relax by turning on the air conditioning. No matter what the temperature I set it to though, I get chilly after like five or ten minutes, and have to turn it off, leaving me to like five or ten comfortable minutes before it gets too hot again and I have to turn it back on. I just can't get comfortable with it. I wonder if it's one of those things I'll get used to. I'm a little bit scared of getting a cold, like last time I was here when I got the worst air con cold ever, snivveling and being gross in general all across Kyoto. Not to be recommended.

Today we went a more tourist-y route than before, seeing as most things are sorted with work and living arrangements now. We headed to Asakusa because mom was adamant about seeing geishas, even through that's more of a Kyoto thing. Generally speaking I think my parents would have been happier in Kyoto, as they're way more into old stuff than all the hustle and bustle of the new in Tokyo. Anyways, Asakusa and the Sensoji temple probably make up for it a bit. Being Saturday it was crowded, but still not terrible. As long as you take pretty much any street that isn't the tourist-y one, you lose like 80% of the people. Anywho, we watched a Geisha performance and some game from the Edo period, which was a little stiff and mechanic-looking, but all in all cool to have seen. I'm not as interested in all of that as my mom is, but I appreciate the aesthetics and history of it.

In comparison it was way more cool to accidentally walk past a Shinto wedding ceremony. I've never seen one before, and it's always made me curious. Obviously the whole affair was family only so there was no way into the shrine, but the doors were all open and we could hang around and gawk into it, and then later gawk at the couple when they came out and took pictures with their family. These things make me a little uncomfortable, as I feel like it's kinda steppig in on their territory, but as even a whole bunch of Japanese people were too, the feeling subsided soon enough.

After all the congratulations we went to a really loud Asakusa bar near the station, where for some reason a whole bunch of upper-middle aged business men kept wanting to help us with stuff. I don't know if it was to do with the face that I was waving some foreigner leg with my short cute skirt, but people kept trying to help us read menus and understand how izakayas work. First a man from Kansai came up while dad was taking a picture and took one of the three of us, before asking where we were from and proclaiming 'SKÅL!' loudly when we said Sweden. Then the business men at the table next to ours tried to explain the menu to my parents, before mom told them that I spoke Japanese and we had a long conversation about what Sweden was like, if Helsinki was the capital (eh, no), if it was rare that my hair was dark (not really) and how beautiful my Japanese pronunciation and intonation was. It's Japan and everyone's prone to give out lavish praise for not much at all, but it's nice to hear that the effort I'm putting into speaking all the time is paying off.

Whenever I see other foreigners who speak Japanese, I get almost a little affronted. I know it's completely stupid, but they're stealing my Special Snowflake-ness. It feels dumb to be kinda hung up on it, but I am. I want to be the coolest foreigner around. They're stealing my thunder. I guess I just have to get over the fact that I'm not the only white person living in Tokyo.