It slipped my mind that the Japan Diaries was stopped for 2 months, oops. And er, it's been about 7 months since I was in Tokyo. That's really long, and my mind may not remember the details well enough, but I still feel that I should write about the final leg of my Japan adventures, Tokyo, because it is a thoroughly modernly mystifying place.
Weirdest place ever, in other words.
But I won't cover the whole Tokyo in this post, firstly because I can't. We spent a good 8 days in that place out of the 16 days in Japan. And our first day in town wasn't exactly a walk in the park. It was in fact, the first time we met with a hostile situation in our hostel.
I want to, but I can't seem to make a good pun with hostile and hostel.
The hostel was named "Ace Inn Shinjuku". Sounds like a trump card right? Barely. When we got to the hostel, located near some forgotten street and below a flyover, it had "dodgy" written all over the entrance (metaphorically). Then, when we entered the place, it was filled with men. Caucasian men. And when we went to our hostel beds, it wasn't beds. It was coffins. No, it was capsules. Which looked so much like coffins. And the room stank.
Felily and Cathy were quite horrified. There was a room on the tenth floor which offered normal beds, but the old man who showed us around explained that that room was fully booked. And when he showed us the shower facilities, we were dumbfounded. You need to put coins in for every ten minutes of shower time.
That was the last straw for us.
Imagine, being trapped in the shower, naked with soap all over, stuck, awkward.
And that'll explain why Japanese people have so much material for porn. Merely a reflection of their real life dilemmas.
We really couldn't see ourselves living there for 7 nights.
So, we tried to find another hostel by logging onto the internet through Colleen's iPhone and also their computers (the ONLY FREE thing you can find there). We also tried to cancel our bookings, which was costly, because they could charge us 100% for the first few days. We prayed really hard, and finally found another hostel not far away. Colleen called the hostel to book our beds, and Felily pleaded with the kindly old man to pay less.
He called his manager, who allowed us to go and pay only for today's stay. Colleen managed to book a hostel and that was it. We were saved from having to take 10 minute showers.
Thank God.
The funny thing was, the hostel we managed to book was rated by others as a "prison", and the matron of the place was indeed, a "prison warden".
But we were still grateful. And that "prison" stay would be my next post.
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