Here’s a video splicing together some footage we took through the window of our city tour bus in Tokyo on January 21st.

Our tour guide and narrator, one Mr. Sato, was quite the humorous one–I especially loved his commentary on the size of the Police Headquarters: Tokyo is so safe that there’s no need for police on the streets…so they just built a big building for them all to sit in and watch TV. (Just try getting away with a crack like that, all you tour guides in China.)

And the educational angle: In case you’ve been wondering how to say “bus” or “light” in Chinese, listen carefully. You’ll hear my then four-year old daughter ask (and get the answers from) my Wife in the middle of this.

The snow in Tokyo on January 21st, 2006 was pretty incredible.

When we flew into Japan the day before, it was clear, with no trace of snow anywhere.

But when we woke up the next morning and looked outside, it felt first like “Snow Day! No School!”

But then I remembered we were just starting our extended vacation in Asia…so we got up and had at it.

Here are some pictures and video from our stop at Meiji Shrine that day, hacked together just to illustrate “Lots of Snow.” (It’s too long, but sorry, I’m not going to take the time to redo it.) My favorite part, though: to clear the snow off the walkways, they were using firehoses. New snow, you can get some traction with that. Frozen firehose water, not so much….

So there we were, right across from the Ford dealership, stranded on The Highway to Hell trying to hail a cab to take us on in to downtown Qingyang.

Not easy.

Cabs do go by that stretch of highway, but most seem to be full of other passengers already heading somewhere.

After quite some time of waiting, I got bored and took a couple traffic photos.

In this one, with the Ford dealership in the background, notice the truck that has just whipped out into traffic, other fast-moving vehicles be damned as they swerve to avoid a collision:

But still no cab.

So I took some video.

This one shows some fast moving vehicles–and a guy on a bike-cart at the end–going in the direction we want to go:

In this next one, more traffic, looking in the opposite direction, and watch that “Bonzai!!!” turn across the traffic lanes there at the end:

Finally, after half an hour, an empty cab came along, but it was headed in the opposite direction. So it did a “Bonzai!!!” u-turn of its own, nearly causing pile-ups in both directions, complete with screeching tires and a blare of honking horns.

Deadly dangerous, but we were overjoyed to see it.