This post has nothing to do with Japan.

A few years ago I was living in Bucharest, Romania and working as an administrator for a bunch of whiny American college students. I loved Romania (especially the calzones), but my students hated it, though I never really understood why. Here is the story of one crisp March morning in Bucharest:

It was a Saturday (no classes), so I got up late and took the subway two stops to meet up with my students. On the train, I was standing at a pole between two doors, when the men on either side of new started pulling several large knives out of their coats. Though I had a vague sense that they weren't there to stab me, I was still quite surprised when they began to juggle the knives on a moving train. Because this kind of spectacle can only be enjoyed in countries that allow large knives on the subway, I decided to stay put and take in the cultural experience, which is when the two men started throwing the knives back and forth between them, which just happened to be where I was standing. Eventually the train arrived at my stop, and I excused myself from the cloud of flying blades (they asked for a tip, but I declined as I was concerned that their little show may not have been entirely safe).

In the subway station, as with nearly every subway station, there was a lonely old musician playing for change, but in this particular case it just so happened to be a violinist playing the saddest song I had ever heard in the middle of a long, empty underground passage. He got a tip.

From the exit, I followed one of those "American Beauty" flying plastic bags around the corner towards the school where my students were staying, and came upon a rather bizarre scene. Two middle-aged women were leaning out of a second story window dangling a string with what appeared to be a hook-shaped, black sausage on the end and laughing hysterically. On the street, and old woman with a can was leaping at the sausage and cursing up a storm. Every time the old woman lunged, the two women upstairs would pull the sausage-looking thing just out of her reach, until at last she caught it, snapped the string with her teeth, tucked the object into her purse and walked away, pausing only to shake her fist up at the window. The women upstairs laughed even harder, pulled up the string and lowered it again with something else hanging off of it, and I walked on.

Around the next corner, not ten yards away, I got stuck behind a slow-moving funeral procession, in which all of the mourners walked behind the coffin, which was on the back of a flatbed truck. The procession eventually stopped at the church across the street from the school where my students were staying, and some pallbearers picked up the coffin and entered the church, only to be chased out by the priest. The priest pointed frantically at the coffin, and then at the truck, and the pallbearers set the coffin down on the truck and removed the lid. they then picked up the coffin again, and again were stopped at the door by the priest. Seemingly unflustered, the pallbearers returned the casket to the truck, and then carried just the lid inside. By that point, all of the mourners had entered and, as the church bell sounded, I was alone on the street with the lidless casket. I looked down, and I was standing on a filthy chest x-ray labeled "Pavel". Naturally, I took Pavel home with me.