Sleep last night was pretty average, but this is largely due to do the decided lack of bedding. Not quite what I wanted after such a long day on the way here, but hey, it should get better once I have actual bedding sorted out. After getting up I had the fun job of working out how to operate the shower. The bathroom here is actually just the size of the shower – the sink in there is on a hinge, so when you want to use the toilet, it takes up the showerspace, and when you want to shower, it sits over top of the toilet. I guess it’s efficient in space and so on, but boy is it weird. After that it was have some sandwiches (I have a very little fridge in my room for storage of such things) and have a view outside from the fifth floor on my little balcony.

Today was a pretty full day, mostly with Stefan again. We walked around Shibuya a whole lot, looking for places that Stefan knew. We went to the post office there, had Wendy’s for lunch (that was so weird… smoking section inside and I had the teriyaki burger), then took a bus to the foreign office. Actually that in itself was a bit of a mission: first we got a bit lost, asked for directions and eventually found the right bus, then get on it, then we took the bus too far because the English directions on our paperwork were wrong, so we had to bus back again to get there. Oops! Anyway, we eventually made it to the right office and filled out our paperwork for alien registration (yes, I’m an alien!) and compulsory insurance. After that, we headed back to Shibuya and had some Chinese for a late lunch. We wandered around looking into shops and picking up bits and pieces that we both needed – bedding, power converters (seems to be the same as the US here, actually), some shoes for me, etc. We also stopped into a manga shop that Stefan knew of called Mandarake, which was like manga/anime geek heaven. I felt a bit lucky that I didn’t really have that much money on me, or it would have disappeared into the shop pretty rapidly! Anyway, we trained back to the dorm then parted ways.

After that I raided all the “free (read: discarded) stuff” sections on each floor of the dormitory, seeing what kind of useful stuff there was. I managed to pick up some floor mats, an extra rubbish bin, a folding chair for on my balcony, an extra pillow, a big cushion and a little television/vcr combo that was next to a pile of VHS tapes. Score! So, I then set up my room nominally, at least until I get some decorations. There are some shelves that I’m eyeing up as well, but might take some fixing. After dinner I spent a bit of time trying to get the tv to work, to no avail… I might just end up putting it back in the pile of discarded stuff on my floor. Dinner was again raiding the local convenience store, this time for drinks, sushi, sandwiches, chips and melon bread. Melon bread (or melon-pan) is something that crops up an awful lot in pop-culture references as one of those ubiquitous snacks for Japanese people, particularly young people, so I was dying to find out what it was actually like.

Verdict: delicious.