Outstanding Story #2

It was brought to my attention that I kind of left you all hanging with only one of my several Outstanding Stories from our adventures with Phil.

Let me fill you in on another (though I don't know that the ones to follow are quite as outstanding as the first).

Outstanding Story #2

When my dad was in town we noticed something interesting. We were walking down on of the shopping streets in Osaka, when we saw one store devoted entirely to straw hats - the kind of straw hats you might expect to see someone wearing while attending to a soda fountain or making a sundae. The store was totally empty. Dad and I didn't hold out much hope for them. It turns out, Dad and I did't understand the subtlety of fashion trends.

I started to see straw hats in all the stores.

When Phil came, he also noticed a straw hat and laughed about it a little. We explained that straw hats were the latest trend and then he started seeing them everywhere. They are often paired with white-washed denim dresses or skirts, big brown leather accessories and feminine floral prints on white fabrics. This is the look of Spring, come to find out - at least, it is this year.

Phil decided he needed pictures - or at least one good picture to show people at home. The problem was getting a picture. It seemed creepy for a guy to take a picture of some girl on the train. Unfortunately, Phil didn't speak enough Japanese to ask, charmingly, if he could take someone's picture. Russell wasn't helping. Phil decided to be covert. He started trying to catch photos of people secretly. They weren't turning out too well, but eventually we got a display in a store window that summed things up. The mass of pictures with straw hats in large crowds should be enough to confirm that yes, this fashion had been adopted by the masses.



Oh, and we also saw Carmen Sandiego.