Silver Case

The wife of a friend/colleague of mine in Tokyo has been in hospital for close to a week now, so today I wanted to send a bouquet of flowers on behalf of Ling, Luke, and I.

I asked the office administrator in Tokyo about this, as I figured I could easily stray into a “you sent a what to a who in a where!?” situation.

She said the two strong guidelines for sending flowers to someone sick in Japan are:

1. No ’strong smelling’ flowers like lillies. (Are lillies strong?)
2. No flowers in pots, because pots are things you’d grow a tree in, trees have roots, and thus you are implying the person is going to be in the hospital for a long time.

So I simplified the guidelines for her, “So I should order flowers that don’t smell good and die quickly” ?

The answer was, “mmmmm basically…. yes.”

This entry was posted on Wednesday, February 21st, 2007 at 10:59 pm and is filed under Japan.You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.