When I got to Shibuya today the sky was blue and Moyai statue had a single cigarette-box tear in its eye. I got my fried pork cutlet and curry fix from Joytime, sitting behind a couple arguing in Japanese and French (I think), and then went across Scramble Intersection into the medina. Two guys were raising skateboards triumphantly right in the middle of the crossing, beaming up at the Starbucks windows where a friend was presumably taking their photo. I raised the V as I passed, just in case.

I passed a woman wearing a pants suit and doing a half-hearted robot outside a shoe store and began the serious business of wandering around aimlessly. (So aimlessly that I almost went inside Museum for Ships, but realised at the last minute that it was a clothing store, not a repository of nautical artifacts.) I ended up in 730, a cafe that always has something Jamaican on the sound system and looks exactly like the overhead view you'll find on that website if you keep clicking through the javascript. They also sell customised lighters that one of the baristas makes.

There I drank some delicious "pu'er tea", wondering what the second character in the name (普洱) meant and kind of wishing I'd brought my dictionary. My rule of thumb when confronting Chinese goods with unknown characters in their names is to assume that the characters refer to place of origin, and apparently good ol' thumby came through for me again.

When I came out, the eastern half of the sky was dazzlingly sunny but the other half was still a gnarled mess of rainclouds, which were still raining on Shibuya. I darted rhythmically from awning to awning down the street, turning sideways to dive through temporary gaps between guys with sideways trucker caps and girls in silky skirts with ribbons and pockets, all the while wondering if this counted as a doshaburi and what the dosha- (土砂) in that word means anyway. The raindrops are so big they feel like earth and sand? Or is it just mimesis and ateji? (But mostly I was looking at the skirts.)

Just outside the station, I saw a guy in a Basquiat t-shirt with his arm around his girlfriend's head as he held the umbrella above them both. Too great a height difference can do strange things to a relationship.