Day 3: A Day of Rest

Today I have done pretty much nothing except resting. Yet another late night into a late morning turned into us deciding to go clubbing because one of the gang is going home tomorrow. The only big problem with this is that we’re moving apartments tomorrow, and have to be out of the house at 10am. Now this wouldn’t be a problem in any other capital city, just go to the party, go head around 2-3 am, sleep for 7 hours and then leave the house then. Not in Japan!

Long ago the four train companies lived in harmony, then Suica attacked…

The train/subway/metro system in Tokyo is convoluted. To be able to do maintenance and upkeep of everything pretty much every single method of public transport is shut down from around midnight to 5 am. Now normally I’d think this is a great idea. It leads to less downtime, more reliable transport, and generally makes things safer for everyone. The only problem being, of course, that it’s incredibly inconvenient for a lot of night owls like us students xD. We could of course get around this by living closer to the party areas, but that’s expensive, and I certainly did not plan for it at all. Another fun side note about the public transit system is that it’s all pretty much privatised and different lines are owned by different companies that don’t always mesh perfectly with each other. This means there are a slew of different types of day tickets covering different combinations of options, and you need to tag in and out at stations to swap between some lines, whilst you don’t need to for other ones. Thank god the Suica system exists in the first place so that even that is possible, without those cards I feel like we’d all be horribly lost down in the catacombs of the subway-stations.

Now, back to the party. In the end I decided to stay home to clean some more and catch up on some sleep (I also really wasn’t looking forwards to moving to a new place on 2-3 hours of sleep so that played a part), and so most of the others went away and I got the apartment mostly to myself (one of my friends stayed behind with me though). Honestly it was quite nice and I managed to do some of the last of my current laundry, which I’ve been doing pretty much every day since I got here because of the heat and moisture. When I first got here I tried the washing machine, which interestingly enough was located on our balcony but it was quite dirty and I decided to just hand wash most of my clothes from then on instead. Hand washing clothes isn’t something I’ve done before really, but it certainly isn’t complicated, and is very quick and efficient, especially when basically anything will dry in just a few hours in this heat. Can highly recommend it for trips to warm places, being able to clean up sweaty shirts and underwear has been a godsend.

The snacks were good, and the folders were pretty!

Oh, and I went and got some Japanese snacks, picking up some Final Fantasy themed folders from a collaboration between a local convenience store, and Magic the Gathering, which itself was having a collaboration with Final Fantasy (truly a wild world we live in). (I found these Day 0, but didn’t quite understand how to buy them. Turns out that you got them for free if you bought a certain amount of snacks from a set of vendors) Anyhow, here are all the snacks I got, as well as the little FF folder thingies!

Welp, with all that said, time for me to put the key out in our lockbox for the others and head to bed!

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