Feeling bombed

I love my walks in Tokyo. I love big bad cities. I simply love the crazy energy and hustle of wicked cities. Exactly why Mumbai is still one of my favourite cities,why the clang of Hong Kong trams was music to my ears as a tourist and now loving Tokyo. Each morning as I walk and wander in downtown lanes I cant help gawk.I can endlessly marvel at the mass of wires and neurosis that is Tokyo. I warned ya I was a city gal.

This blew me off. I saw this apartment block one day (check pic below)...the building in the middle with stacks of cubes each with a porthole. Each cube is one single apartment. Yes - one cube, one window,one home. I had seen this earlier in a National Geographic documentary.But now I knew it was for real.

Tokyo can get you down sometimes. The greyness and bleakness draining the spirits out of you. You can feel you are in a post-apocalyptic 'manga' (Japanese comics) city where everything has been bombed and has no future. Featureless architecture, overhead cables criss crossing, sooty underbellies of mammoth over-bridges. Expression less men in black suits.Tokyo's big (really big) fat crows cawing deep guttral caws like Messengers of Death and Destruction - help complete the picture of gloom.Took me a while to get used to those guys!

After living in picture perfect Singapore - where things had to look good and getting glimpses of Hong Kong's fabulous skyline with the backdrop of green hills, Tokyo needed raw guts to like! Always makes me wonder how the same people who gave us ikebana could come up with such soulless stuff. I am already thinking - like India, Japan may not be easy to crack.