Something I like thinking about is how much "activity" a friendship needs to sustain itself. A lot of my friendships are inevitably built on some kind of common activity — living in the same city, going to the same school, doing the same borderline-jingoistic extracurriculars —and sometimes, regrettably, those bonds dim when the activity is no longer shared. This is perhaps part of why most of my time with friends is defined by some kind of "activity". When asked what we did, there is a clear answer. With Raymond (who bravely agreed to us exploring Japan over his March break) I'm not sure I've ever had a clear answer for what, exactly, we did. I asked to borrow his camera once over COVID, we hung out for a bit repeating the same marginally-chronically-online inside joke, and we exchanged numbers. That summer, my monthly frequency of visiting Raymond skyrocketed to double digits. I'm actually not sure what, precisely, we did. There were some Youtube videos, some random sports, lots of playing with his dog, playing cards with his mom, and I think (?) studying for the SAT, which neither of us ended up taking. However, I do remember always having a pretty good time. Even when you'd think the conditions were particularly horrid (e.g I once broke my bike in Chinatown & we spent half a hour finding a solution) or particularly amazing (e.g we skipped a lot of schoolwork to go watch movies), no matter what, we just had a pretty good time. I'm fairly confident if you put us in a white room, no distractions, we'd still be pretty entertained for a while. Or the room would blow up. We'd find a way (judging from the one & only time we've cooked together). On some level, our now-somehow-a-tradition of running across countries and flying over oceans to see each other[^1] — a tradition distinctly different from our old summer days of living 20 minutes from each other — is somewhat a waste of resources, because we truthfully do the same activity in every city. Again, I'm not 100% certain what we do when we hang out, apart from talk and walk and eat when necessary, but I remember we usually have a good time. While before Japan I didn't recognise this rare aspect, but now I'm more comfortable with accepting that we are probably better off without any plans. Perhaps use this as a convenient excuse for why I have limited cultural tourist reflections from this country (I'd been before in any case). However, we did walk by the same LeBron billboard ~sixteen times. How's that for culture. [^1]: Places we have met up this year (NB neither of us live in any of these places): Washington DC, New York, Japan, Shanghai, Hangzhou.