Before Hokkaido

(Backdated to when I would have updated if I'd had internet at the time)

Left Global House midday yesterday after spending most of the morning finishing up packing etc. for HOKKAIDO(!!!). Unfortunately we hadn’t been able to find a hostel or hotel that would hose six of us, so James, Katie and I stayed in one hotel while Kim, Nora and Viktor (one of the grad students we hung out with in SCJ) stayed at another. So, Katie and James and I hopped what we thought was the JR Chuou line to (Ohkubo) where our hotel was, but turned out to not even be a JR train at all. After spending a good half an hour realizing we were on the wrong train, we turned around and headed back to Nakano station to get on the proper train. After this extra hour or so of traveling, we wound up in Ohkubo and got all set up in our crazy awesome hotel. Once we were all moved in we went out to get lunch.

We planned on wandering into Korea Town to get food, but James was ridiculously hungry and I was vaguely overheated and not looking forward to wandering around in the sun. As a result, we went back toward our hotel to the little conveyor belt sushi place where James managed a seven-plate pile’s worth of food. For those of you that don’t know, the way conveyor belt sushi works is that everybody sits at the bar with a sushi-filled conveyor belt moving at (seated) eye-level. Whenever anything looks good, you just grab it and eat it. The plates are color-coded to the price of the sushi and you don’t pay until the end. I think the most invigorating part about it for me was the plate of wasabi-filled sushi that I didn’t realize had wasabi until I’d put it in my mouth. Again, for those of you that don’t know, I have a VERY low spice tolerance, so this was vaguely painful. Luckily, I had a James to pawn it off on so it didn't go to waste

After lunch we attempted to get me some money because I’d forgotten to withdraw any money before we left school, but I was being ATM incompetent so that didn’t really work. Once I’d conceded defeat, we went back to the hotel intending to power nap for about an hour and then go wandering around Korea Town, but Katie and James both slept through the alarm and I decided (for some reason that seemed good while I was half-asleep) that we were just going to stay and sleep instead. We woke up for real at about seven when Viktor called to ask us about dinner. We met him and Katie and Nora in Shinjuku (only one station along from our hotel) for dinner. We found a cute little Indian place where I had yet ANOTHER spice fail in the form of ordering this delicious looking chicken dish that was pretty ridiculously spicy. But I gamansuru’ed (persevered) my way through it and it was actually a pretty enjoyable experience once I got over the spice. We were also treated to some ridiculously entertaining Bollywood music videos while we ate.

After we finished dinner, we wandered around looking for purikuraa, but there apparently wasn’t one on the west side of the station so we bailed on the purikuraa and headed back to our hotel to sleep. We stopped again for money and this time I DIDN’T ATM fail and actually got some cash to last me the trip to Hokkaido. Once that was taken care of, we headed back to the hotel and crashed for the night.

This morning consisted of a nice little sleep in, a shower in our bad-ass shower of awesome, and breakfast, courtesy of Katie. From here we’re going to head out to Shinjuku again for a leisurely lunch with Kim, Nora and Viktor again, and then we’re going to head out to Tokyo station to leave for HOKKAIDO!!! YAAAAYYYYY!!!!!

(9/23 Edit: Associated photos can be found here:

http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2036250&id=1186934580&l=921cbcd44e

Enjoy!!)

~Anna