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  Am in hour 5 of a high-speed train ride from Shanghai to Zhengzhou and the sky has been yellow-grey with air pollution the whole way.

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  Honestly dissuaded from invading China just based on the number of stairs it would involve.

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  Getting dinner at a tiny order-by-ticket ramen place round the corner from the house I'm staying in. They just got a hot sake order and are heating the stoneware bottle in one of the noodle baskets, which seems normal and obvious when you see it! I feel a little gross from disordered sleep and doing 25k steps around Tokyo today but I'm still pretty happy. Hopefully spicy ramen sorts it all out.

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  I was dismissive of the group travel thing, but dang was it nice to just show up for meals etc. On the other hand, back in solo mode I just: - navigated a pharmacy convo using my shitty Duolingo Japanese,and got cold medicine and masks - figured out a shinkansen ticket purchase and loaded it onto my travel card (did you know Japan has two systems for this for westbound and eastbound trains? I didn't!), - and booked a nice hotel a short hop from a pottery festival

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  So I'm in Japan's official gyoza town, in a gyoza bar, with groups of besuited dudes (and the occasional woman coworker) getting shitfaced and eating gyozas. Apparently the origin story is that returning soldiers and settlers brought the potsticker concept back from China after WW2, and they made it their own! They don't comment further on they were doing there, which is wild considering every 3rd TV program we saw in China was a historical drama about the evils of the J...