ugh eff this i gotta finish before i leave and before i forget any of this ever happened. and so, let me proceed with the remnants of my memories. forgive the lack of specific details as seen in previous posts because seriously, it has been half a year, and i am already 2 decades old, as epic as the trip was. i try my best; ganbarimaaaa~su!

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2009 21 JUNE SUNDAY

as mentioned earlier, i shifted beds to the one in the corner. and this is how the room looks like from my view.



remember, i was in the bed at the corner. in this small room, there were 4 bunkbeds in which we were crammed together with 6 other caucasians. intimidating, but pretty cosy for a backpacker's hostel.



the ceiling was quite low as well, so that when you're lying on the upper bunk if you're too big you might actually touch the ceiling when you flip over. okay, not that close but you get the picture.



the view from our window - hanayashiki amusement park with one of its friendly guards. not exactly disney world but it had its small town charm. it was kinda soothing to wake up to kids and adults having fun on the rides; there is just something about living near an amusement park. we tell ourselves we will find the time - after all we have 10 whole days! - to explore hanayashiki.

i was snapping all of these while waiting for the zhu to finish primping in the toilet. to my horror it started raining. it was raining in the early morning but stopped for an interval, before it started pouring again. we were aware that it was the rainy season, but we had no idea what we were getting ourselves into and we had no wet weather programme whatsoever despite travel sites everywhere telling of the high amount of rainfall during this period of the year.



the natives with their trademark vinyl umbrellas. also I LOVE JAPANESE STREETS, STEEEL.

so we lazed around in the hostel a bit attempting to wait for the rain to stop. but it never did. at about lunch time when we were too restless and hungry to stay in the small room we armed ourselves with zhu's umbrella and braved the rain.

the crappiest thing about travelling in the rain has got to be finding food, especially since nakamisedori has so many different foods that we had wanted to try one by one as we walk past it everyday but for that morning it was just impossible to be standing in the rain just to try that one type of food. and even if we had proper places we had wanted to venture to in the form of a list that we had come up with we were too lazy to find it in the rain. and so we settled for a so-so sobaya opposite macdonald's in the row of sheltered shops since it was the cheapest around. it was... so-so.

exiting from the sobaya we find ourselves separated from the matsuuya departmental store ahead by only a pedestrain crossing. in the rain we sighed and threw away our plans and threw ourselves into matsuya. "oh well i guess let's go walk around in the building until it stops raining," we said. and so we did...

...and left the building with two bags of uniqlo stuff each, and zhu with another bag of stationery, and significantly poorer. LOL.

it was drizzling lightly when we left, and we attempted to walk around asakusa to explore, but we ended up walking in circles. while doing that when we walked past the entrance to nakamisedori we witnessed and got stopped by many tour guides trying to make a living.

along the way we spotted many karaoke bars, and so decided that it was fruitless to keep walking around aimlessly. we went into one of the karaoke bars (which was apparently one of the better ones idk)... was it shida-x that we went at this time? we went so many times i forgot but yes. we got ourselves a room for an hour, and ended up extending it an hour more.



the zhu singing chinese songs in a japanese ktv. hay well done thar zhu, as if singing chinese songs in canadian ktvs aren't wasteful enough.

i tried to sing japanese songs but it was boring singing alone so we ended up singing spice girls and high school musical songs. SO TELL ME WHATCHU WANT WHATCHU REALLI REALLI WAN

zhu then talked to her friend juliet who was in town and arranged for a meet up.

trying to speak to the counter staff using the phone while zhu was singing her lungs off was the funniest shit ever. i had no idea how to say extension in japanese and so i had to first tell her i have limited japanese vocab, then try telling her in broken english (think "stay"... "time"... "longer"... "okay?") but then i gave up and then tried to tell her in broken japanese instead (all of those words in japanese). cue rambling in japanese by the staff and then a "HAI ARIGATOU!" and hang up the phone. painful... but funny.

when we left the karaoke bar (we didn't even order drinks -.-) it was already dark and so we wandered around looking for somewhere to eat. lazy, and tired from our gig, we settled into ANOTHER sobaya which seemed to be decent and cheap enough. that's the thing about staying in a tourist area - the restaurants are never cheap. by then we were probably the last people to be in the shop.



i had my second tororo zaru soba in 3 days. god i miss it so much now, and it's almost impossible to find it here.

since it was still drizzling and there's nothing much to do around anyway, we sadly trudged back to the hostel.

i gotta say though, our daily walks to and fro from sakura hostel was nothing less than a scenic and amazing tour. it was different everyday. in the morning we had the tourist crowd, and then at night when the shops are all closed and it was quiet and cooling we had people walking their cute little dogs and people on bikes and people just waiting around randomly. we walked past the closed shops, the temple, the alley, the amusement park. the open roads with the convienience stores, and then back into the alley with its quaint little carparks and cramped pretty houses with a love hotel right before we reach our hostel. it was quite a sight, and i was amazed everyday.

oh, don't worry. that wasn't our most unproductive day either.

DAY 2
DAY1