I spent a lot of time Saturday wandering around the local area to get a
feel for it. It was surprisingly quiet, but then again it’s Saturday in
a business district, so it’s to be expected. The hotel I’m at is across
the street from the Tokyo Metropolitan Building, which is the tallest
building in the area and has a nice observation deck at the top (45th
floor, although the floors here must be bigger than the floors in the
triangle tube building we were in yesterday as I was looking down at
that building). I got a number of decent shots of the city… it’s the
density of New York, coupled with the sprawl of Los Angeles. It’s just
something you have to see.
Somewhere along the line, I manage to accidentally put my finger on the
new telephoto lens… d’oh! So now I need to pick up a lens cleaner…
OK, time to see how much I retain from 20 weeks of Japanese class! The
way to ask “Where is
/Dochira/ is the polite form of “where,” /desu/ is “is,” and /ka/ is the
Japanese question mark. Also, /desu ka/ is pronounced des-ka, the u is
silent. Now the tough part was what the translation is for lens cleaning
paper. I knew that “lens” was simply “rensu” — in Japanese, “l” and
“r” are the same (well, the true pronunciation is a bit in between, and
actually sounds a bit like a “d” to me). Trailing “s” is always “su”
where the “u” is silent. So, I took a guess with paper — peipaa, which
is the phonetic translation. So, I found a nice uniformed Yodabashi
sales clerk, went up, and asked: ”すみません、レンスペイパーどちらです
か？” — “/Sumimasen, rensu peipaa dochira desu ka?/” He brought me
over to a different section with binoculars. I asked someone the same
question here, and the gentleman said “yon-kai” — fourth floor! Up I
went (this place is huge… I think it’s 5 floors of camera stuff), and
on the 4th floor I found tripods and, yes, lens cleaning paper (chamois,
actually). Spent a bit of time figuring out what would be good, bought
it, and we’re done! Yay!
I know, it’s a mindless, trivial thing to buy some lens paper. But
y’know, in a foreign language as alien as Japanese, this was a huge step!