The glory and splendor of Japan with old friends!

I have had a quite busy weekend with a couple of old friends, "Double D" as I call the two of them collectively, came to visit me in Japan from the old country and I played the tour guide. I haven't really socialized with them in over 15 years, but it was a nice surprise to see that we could still have fun together and that they were basically the same as before.

Throughout the weekend I took them around Tokyo and showed them the sleaze of the deepest parts of Shinjuku (beware of homosexualities), the cool modern hipness of Shibuya at night, the wonders of the Japanese cuisine and alcoholic beverages,the deep cultural heritage of the Kaminarimon at Asakusa and the hyper-modern Odaiba. Basically I took them on a roller coaster of all that is Tokyo today. Through it all they kept politely impressed and seemed to enjoy seeing the sights asking questions and so as we went along.

But... the thing that got them most excited was the excursion to a Japanese supermarket... Although I intellectually can understand that it is fun and interesting to visit a Japanese supermarket as a visitor to Japan, I was still extremely impressed by their enthusiasm for something which to me is a very mundane part of life here in Tokyo... In total, we probably spent the biggest concentrated amount of time in the supermarket as they ran around among the shelves, picking up and looking at everything and forcing me to translate labels for them. When checking out, they probably were the cashier's nightmare, with tons of different purchases, all in the smallest packages available so they could buy different stuff... Oh, and yeah, let's not even mention the time spent in the liquor section...

So now I've basically realized that next time I have friends coming over; I can just put down the serious planning of researching amazing events in Tokyo and just let people loose in a local supermarket and that will probably be a huge hit. What puzzles me though is how they expect to fit all the stuff they bought in their bags for the trip home; I'm not sure they fully realized this when they went shopping...