40 Days of Summer (in Japan) - Part San

Today was a pretty lazy day. For some reason I just could not wake up this morning, and slept in till 9 am. After hammering out a blog post, I quickly packed up my stuff before we overstayed our welcome and had to pay for another night.

Steve left early, probably to see if he can find an Xbox One.

We pushed our luggage to a nearby King of Curry and had curry rice for lunch. I love Japanese curry; it's spicy but not melt-your-tongue spicy, and they innovate by adding cheese. It was delicious. Another thing I've been waiting for for two years.

One of the five dishes you'll meet in heaven.

We get to the hostel pretty early and meet Payal there, who's really excited to see us, even though she hadn't slept for about twenty-four hours on her overnight flight. I went for a walk around the area; nothing especially exciting. I found this second-hand bookstore selling really cheap but really good quality stuff; I tried looking for cheap PC games but they didn't have any, only titles for the Nintendo platforms and the Xbox.

In another bookstore, I found this adorable book, which seemed to be a bunch of cat-related motivational posters, all squeezed into one book. (There was Japanese too, but I couldn't read it.)

Yeah, and the role of some colours is to look like other colours.

People were starting to trickle in during the rest of the day; the first non-YNC person I met was Stephanie, who's a Singaporean studying at Yale. I didn't get to talk to her much, but she seems like a nice person.

That's her in the bottom left, with Nia, Linus and the rare smiling Xi Min.

We're staying the night at Tokyo Central Youth Hostel, just a few minutes from Iidabashi Station. Our hostel rooms are huge; it's probably where most of the cost is going. Two bunk beds with a small lounge area with a couch, a small desk, and a wonderful view of the city. It's a shame that they have a curfew at 11pm and a 600-yen breakfast. We've checked into a prison camp; apparently it's like the YMCA hostels back home.

This isn't what I imagined when they said "pay-per-view".

We went out for dinner, a whole bunch of us. I had curry udon (because you can never have enough curry) and came back early to finish up blogging.

How does it taste so good?! It's just brown sauce and flour!

And bathe, too, because they close the showers at midnight. And they're public baths, the kind with a undressing area where you're supposed to disrobe and then saunter into the public bathing area with nothing but your towel and your dignity. Thank goodness for shower curtains, or I might not have been able to hold my own...

Apparently our host families are coming in tomorrow to pick us up. I wonder what they'll be like. I hope they're nice people, and not crazy murdering psychopaths. Their seven-year-old kid probably has more Japanese than I do. I hope they have neighbours or friends around my age so that I'll have someone more comfortable to talk to.