I woke up at 5:30 Saturday morning. Even after only sleeping 4 hours on Wednesday night and about 3 hours on the plane, my body wouldn't let me sleep any more. I should also mention that the sun was up by this time. I took a shower and soaked in the tub for about 10 minutes. In Japan, the bathtub is only used for soaking, and you have to shower first because everyone uses the same water. It stays covered when not in use so it will stay hot. The manager told me that the bathroom is cleaned every morning at 10:00, so I assume they change the water then as well. After bathing, I studied for a few hours before Takamura-san arrived.
My dorm is in a large suburban area. There's one main road that has some shops and restaurants, but off that road is almost nothing but tightly packed houses. There are a few really small shops, a few parks, and there are probably a few schools around, but mostly houses. I'll come back to this because I'm skipping ahead a little bit in the story. We drove about 30 minutes to get to a bigger department store. We started at a hyakuen shop (hyakuen - ¥100). A hyakuen shop is similar to a dollar store in the US, but a dollar store usually just means that items are priced to the nearest dollar. In a hyakuen shop, everything is ¥100 unless specifically marked, and the shop we went to was pretty big. I bought a trash can, laundry detergent, a 6-pack of coat hangers, and slippers[0] for the dorm all for ¥100 each. I also bought some sandals for work for about ¥300.
After the hyakuen shop, we went to a nearby department store[1] to look for a pillow and bed cover. It looked a lot like Ikea, but it was much more expensive. We couldn't find a pillow for less than ¥3000 or a bed spread for less than ¥6000. Takamura-san talked to an employee and found out that the floor below us had cheaper items. I said we were on the non-college student floor. We went downstairs and bought a pillow for ¥600 and a bed cover for ¥960. Once we finished shopping, he took me to an Italian restaurant for lunch. Everything was really cheap, apparently because it was a chain restaurant. My spaghetti with spinach and cream sauce was around ¥450, and I had a small glass of wine for ¥100 just for the sheer novelty of it.
After lunch, he took me back to the dorm, and I finished unpacking. I then decided to do what was inevitably going to happen at some point: get lost. I went for a long walk down the main road, but I eventually turned off to go exploring. After two or three turns, I still knew where I was enough to go back the way I came to the main road, but if you know me, you probably know I didn't backtrack. After a few more turns, I was all in. The best part was I didn't take anything with me. I have a copy of my passport in my backpack for a good reason. I also didn't have the address of my dorm, and I don't know if it's common knowledge that NTT has a dorm in the area. So, I continued through row after row of houses until I eventually made it back to the main road. I remembered which road I took to get to the main road, and when I got there, it had been about an hour and a half since I left. From that point, the dorm was less than 5 minutes away, but you can probably guess what happened next. I didn't know how to get back to the dorm, but I did know I was really close, so I started walking through each street trying to find it. I must have passed the same park and river at least 5 times. I eventually found a little restaurant that Takamura-san and I had passed on the way to the dorm the night before, so I knew I was really close. About 15 minutes later without finding it, I went back to the restaurant to try from that point again. I walked from it to the end of the street and stopped to look around. Lo and behold, the dorm was right there at the end of the street. From the time I left the main road until I returned to the dorm was about another hour and a half, so in total, I walked for about three hours.
After resting for a little bit, I walked back to the restaurant down the street. I had no idea at the time what an awesome decision that was. The fun started when they handed me a menu. I could only read bits and pieces of it, but I studied it for a good 10 minutes before ordering anything. The first mistake was when I asked for “osake.” You may know that Japanese rice wine is called sake. What you may not know is that “osake” is the word for any alcohol. It was a small slip, but it took at least five minutes to explain that I just wanted sake. I could hear them in the back asking if anyone knew English. Eventually, they brought out a girl who knew some English to help me order. It got even more fun here since I couldn't read most of the menu and was trying to ask what they served. The best part was when the girl called someone on her cell phone who knew more English than she did and had me talk to her. That helped some, but her English wasn't perfect either. We finally settled on tuna sashimi[2].
There was an old man sitting next to me who I spent most of the night talking to, or at least trying to. He only knew a few words in English, but I tried my best to talk with him in Japanese. We also talked a bit with the waitress. I told them that I had just arrived the day before and was interning with NTT until November and staying at the dorm. The man was 60 years old, and I think he said his name was Uchida. He had a pitcher of green tea and a bottle of what I think he said was “Japanese Vodka,” though I was never quite sure that that's what he said, and he was mixing the two together. He had me try it with and without the green tea. He said that the alcohol was “hard” and that mixing them together made it “soft.” At this point, he started buying food and drinks for me. I don't think that's all that uncommon, but it was interesting, not to mention unexpected. He bought another bottle of his drink for us. At some point he asked me if I liked his drink or sake more. When I said sake, he bought me another order of sake. It starts getting fuzzy after that. He bought two pieces of yakitori[3], one was pork with salt and the other was chicken with soy sauce. He asked me which I liked better, and I said the pork. Towards the end of the evening, I was surprised by a sparkler in someone's dish. It turned out to be ice cream with a sparkler sticking out (I don't know if that's common in Japan or not). I didn't realize it, but he ordered one for me. Shortly after that, we paid up and left. My bill was about ¥1300, but his was over ¥5000. I made the short walk back and went straight to bed around 9:30.
[0] It's customary in Japan to take off your shoes when you enter many buildings (not usually stores and restaurants, but usually homes and sometimes offices). Many places will have a few pairs for guests, but if you will be at a place for an extended time, you usually get your own. I have never been so glad to have small feet before now. I wear an 8.5, and the guest slippers just barely fit me. If my feet were any bigger, I would not have been able to find any slippers that fit me in the hyakuen shop.
[1] Department stores are usually very large and several floors in Japan (think Macy's or Bloomingdale's). The store we went to was called Home's and had three floors. As an aside, there was a smaller clothing store inside called Uni Qlo (I don't know if it's supposed to be two words or just one. It was in all caps and the two parts were on two lines). My best guess is that it's a contraction of “unique look.”
[2] Sushi is raw fish on top of rice. Sashimi is just the fish. Sometimes it may come with other things, but mine only came with diced radish and wasabi. The waitress and Uchida-san seemed surprised that I knew what the wasabi was (the waitress even more so that I ate it), but I told them that Japanese restaurants are common in the US.
[3] Yakitori is pretty much just grilled meat on a stick. It's served either with soy sauce or salted.
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