disoriented

Yesterday some friends meet up in Yokohama for a very casual B-day day with our friend Alistair. We were all in a very mellow mood so we just enjoyed a lot of walking and drinking. We found a wonderful outdoor cafe area with chairs overlooking part of yokohama bay. We had great dinner and then went to a couple bars. Since the guys were leading, we ended up in some "gaijin" bars (since they knew them). Only my second time in a gaijin bar, but it really is a surreal experience. Both bars where more or less pick-up places for foreign guys and japanese girls. there were the occasional japanese guys, but I think most where there for the bar and not really looking for foreign girls. But the second bar was really disorienting. It was really american and obviously lots of regulars, with people high-fiving the bartenders. Also the waitress had really strong american mannerisms even though she was japanese. I felt like I had to be very american in that bar, and there were lots of american navy types there. really really surreal and disorienting. I actually felt completely out of place there. Not that I have assimilated or become this perfect japanese-like foreigner, but more that I so like and enjoy Tokyo for itself that stepping into such an overt little pocket of American bar scene was really strange and a bit of culture shock. It is strange though because I guess that many would find such a place like home, or a nice relief from Tokyo. Not me.
It did make me realize that most likely any Japanese guy who would consider dating an American, would probably want an American girl who acts like an American. I guess it would be the same in the states, if a foreigner did not speak English well and was trying really hard to fit in and be American, it would just be odd and not really attractive. Now if I spoke japanese then that might be different. Like I said... disorienting...

the sky is falling....

So I am a bit bored and instead of my normal posts I thought I'd do the "blogger" thing of talking about someone elses post. A recent think tank study is showing that that the internet may collapse in a traffic-jam by 2012 and that the first signs of this may start appearing next year in 2010. The internet for all its "distributed-ness" still basically bottlenecks at a few backbone points. The funny thing is that I have been starting to see this over the last year. I used to be able to use most American sites very easily, but recently I have noticed some sites just not responding, but the Japanese version will work nicely. I know there are a lot of "doom" stories going around and a lot of scare tactics and FUD, but this one might actually be not so far off the mark... How many people (myself included) would be able to cope if the internet went down?