Random Observations regarding footware

  • Young people all wear converse.
  • Socks are a big deal. Baggy socks (a la scrunchy socks) are cool here, as are these weird socks that lace up your leg.
  • Most people around our age (women) wear sandals with kitten heels. And few know how to walk in them which results in clunk clunk clunking around (especially going up and down stairs in the subway stations).
  • People in Kimonos really do walk around in these thong type shoes with the hard wooden bottoms with funky socks that have a gap between the big toe and the other four. For the record their clunks are louder than the kitten heels.
  • The shoe situation here is fairly complex – when you enter a home/restaraunt/temple you generally have to step up onto a platform, and shoes are not allowed. Occasionaly indoor slippers are provided. When you go to the bathroom, there will always be a pair of bathroom slippers for you to wear. The trick is remembering to switch back into your other slippers – we keep on leaving bathrooms in restaraunts and getting back to our table wearing the bathroom shoes.
  • When you leave your shoes outside, it seems like you are supposed to have the toes facing away from the platform. I am trying to figure out if people here turn to step up backwards onto the platform so that their shoes are already facing the right direction, or if they use their hands to turn them around. Cause at the temple we slept in, the guy followed us around and kept fixing our shoes for us and it was weird.
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