So a lot has happened sense I last updated my blog, but not a lot of noteworthy stuff. Life settled down, I applied to grad schools, applied to and rejected jobs, met random people (more on that later). But for the most part its just been life. I haven't really had any interesting stories to tell, until now.
My friend Soyoung came from America on Friday and forced me into tourist mode. I took her all around Tokyo, and we saw some pretty cool things. Ninjas, Hats with pockets, the Mori tower at night. Lots of things that are cool for me, amazing for a tourist, but boring to write about.
Whats not boring is how I met her. Soyoung sent me her itenaray about two weeks in advance. She planned to arrive at Hachiko at 10pm on Friday and we would go back to my dorm from there. That was the plan at least.
On Friday, I went to Hachiko to meet her, and while I'm waiting grab some drinks with my friend. We are waiting for quite a while, past the time that she should have landed and I expected to get an email from her. Thats when I look at the intenary and realize that everything just went to hell. It turns out her plane gets into Narita airport at 10:00, not 7 as I initially planned for. From Narita to my house is about a 3 hour trip, and the trains stop running at 12:30. She was going to be stranded in the middle of Tokyo with no hotel and no command of the Japanese language what so ever.
I decided to go pick her up near Ueno station. I got there at 12, and by then she was jetlagged beyond belief.
We set about looking for a hotel to stay at, but couldn't find one in our general location. I did find a capsule hotel in Akihabara* that allowed women to spend the night though, so we hopped on a train and went to there.
We found the capsule hotel no problem, unfortunately it had closed in 2009. We started back tracking to the station when I saw a manga kissa, a kind of internet cafe, with a plainly labelled sign that said "Miss your last train, no problem!"
So we go inside, and while buying our rooms (Most manga kissas are for individuals, sometimes two people can use the same room, this one didn't have that option) the shop keeper kind of looks at us funny and says "Are you sure you want to spend the night here, girls don't normally sleep here?"
I look back at him, ask him if they can. He says yes, and buy our room tickets. Everything is working out. We pick out what rooms we want to stay in. Then the guy behind the desk gives us our baskets to take up to the room. Normally these can be filled with DVD's and games. However, he gives me a present. Its a super cheep vagina in a can. I think its a bit odd, but at this point I just want to sleep, and don't really care.
We go upstairs to our room, and we finally realize why the guy said girls don't normally spend the night here. I learned before that there are two types of manga kissas. One is normal, you rent videos, and have a private space, something which is lacking in Japan. The other is a hentai manga kissa. Where you rent porn and have private space, something which is lacking in Japan. Guess what one we went to?
As we are walking to our rooms there is porn everywhere on the walls. Thankfully no porn in the rooms. Just two boxes of tissue. Sleeping was made difficult due to drunk Japanese men snoring next to me. Soyoung had trouble sleeping due to other noises she heard.
To make matters worse, we had bough sleeper rooms, but our rooms didn't have any beds in them. We had to make due with sticky leather chairs. Around 4:30, an hour before we had planned to get up both Soyoung and I realized that the beds in our respective rooms were right next to us. It was just so dark in the rooms that we didn't see them.
That was Soyoung's first night in Japan. The rest of the day, was equally crazy, but those are standard tourist stories, and for her to tell, not me.
*For those who don't know Akihabara is also known as electric town. Famous for all things nerdy, Anime, video games, and sex shops.
