It is kind of nice to not understand anything at all, besides the sentences and signs that are translated for you. It is strange to not even being able to read anything that's written on posters signs menus etc. I've already found my favorite soup here in Tokyo. It is a noodle soup which is made at my subway station in a store from which I forgot the name. It is a small noodle restaurant with around 30 places to sit. I am asked to sit, I can't understand a word, I can't read the menu but I order the soup with the shortest word/the shortest name, the one with the smallest amount of signs. I figured that something like this might be the simplest and since it is a noodle store it must be some kind of noodles. The price didn't look too expensive a sign with two zeros so I figured it can't be more than 900, hopping I was right with my western logic. And I was right, besides the fact that this is the only thing I can order by pointing on it, it is the best meal, because of it's delicious simplicity. Yesterday I had dinner with the artists, curators and the president of Wacoal. I sat across the President and talked mainly with him and the curator of the exhibition, through my "interpreter". So I am talking always through my translator, the whole day, the press conference, meetings, dialogues, interviews....everything with sort of a shadow of a woman, having a nice personality and being very interested and concerned in her questions, it is strange but also funny, you feel as if you are walking around with your mirror. I talked in direction to the president, knowing that he doesn't understand me, while the translator talked into his direction as well. He was continuously following my mouth and my words and still there was a very interesting dialogue. here a translator is called interpreter, which probably comes closely to what is done, when western thought stones are planted into eastern thinking heads and vise versa.

I like to get to know a city like this, I know it might be a strange way to get to know a place but it is the smoothest way to confront my own system and get to know another world which I can't be part of it but can enjoy as an experience. I look around very much but I don't go to the most important sites that 'one" should have seen yet. maybe I'll go once it is time for it. Right now I am so overwhelmed by canning people, Japanese words sometimes i recognize a sign, from Chinese, sometimes even a spoken word but it sounds or looks more like a familiar image, something that is very remote and still so near. I am operating a computer with a Japanese system, which s funny because I recognize the words by where they are, their length, "small icon" must be a longer word than "icon," i recognize the icons and work out the things as they are. "Hermes Baby" is still running on western time and before yesterday I tried to get my it to talk with the Japanese Power PC, that i use during my performance . No chance, the western model of information transmitter refused to recognize the Japanese system, it wouldn't even show up in the Apple talk box...That's the life in Japanese computers. This certainly not my last letter, but the last one to be put into the a-dress in Canada. Soon I will write daily from my trip around the world collecting beads for the Olympics traveling fro Atlanta to Atlanta. This will be starting the first of may. So keep on reading, those who I didn't loose yet, thanks for staying in touch. Thanks especially to Nora Heitmann, who was reading my letters everyday and downloading, printing and affixing the letter leaves every day into my dress, each printed leave she hung into my a-dress connecting it to a dried leave from the outside...