Friday, March 28^th

     After a long night of dragging bedding around for what seemed like an hour and crashing right afterwards, I… well, woke up and wrote the end of the other day’s post. But then probably went and showered so that I was ready to do what I had to the rest of the day.

     Showering is another issue that I’ve been confronted with every day since even before I got my towels. Wait, I don’t think I mentioned that I didn’t bring towels. But I didn’t! They take up too much space! And I didn’t get towels until I got the bedding, so yes, I was a little grungy that whooole day of walking around. But not as grungy as you think…! I was able to wash myself somewhat, and while I’d like to tell you the whole story, I’m not going to be able to because 1) it should have been in the last post, and 2) it’s on the podcast! After I’m done with this post I’ll be sure to upload the podcast somehow so you can hear the complete bathroom situation the first day. But on with the current situation!

     Luckily I’ve been able to go to the showers without being confronted by another person, but soon enough I’m going to be… and hopefully I’ve been doing everything right. The first time I went to shower I walked the wrong way, and that’s kind of embarrassing because when you walk downstairs towards the showers you have the dining area doors directly in front of you. So, anyone that saw me coming down the stairs for the showers also saw me walk the wrong way down the hall that also has windows to the dining area and thus turn around to walk the other way. I made it, though, and have never made that mistake again. Other mistakes may be happening, but I’m not sure. First, I really don’t think that the Japanese have specific shower shoes. If I recall correctly from my time at the building that I stayed in with USHSD in 2004, you take your slippers off in the first room and walk into the shower room. After being in a college dorm with a communal bathroom once already in my life, I really don’t trust walking into those showers barefoot, especially since we have other residents who aren’t Japanese (not saying that some of them wouldn’t be as disgusting as some of us, but I’m inclined to think that the scale is tipped somewhat in their favor). That being said, I’ve been using my shower shoes, just waiting for someone to be weirded out that I’m using SANDALS in the SHOWER. Goodness.

(As I mentioned last post, you have to wear sandals/slippers everywhere in Japan. They do it in schools, you have separate ones for the house and for the bathroom, etc., so they’re pretty sacred. By the way, the sandals I bought in Shibuya? They cost me $26 because my feet are about TWO TIMES the size of a normal Japanese person.)   

The second thing about the shower is, I don’t know when to get naked. I’m pretty sure you do it in the first room, bring in your towel to the shower, and then return to the communal room to put on your fresh clothes, but I don’t know. I don’t know about you all, but I think it’s less embarrassing to bring your underwear with you and come out seeing everyone else naked in the communal room than to come out naked and see everyone with their underwear on in the communal room. But that’s just me.

No, really! On with the day’s events! Jen was gone with Dan at Sophia to exercise and look around, so Natalie and I did some running around. Basically we went to find lunch and wound up getting turned around right outside our dorm and ended up back at the supermarket we were at the day before. Not knowing how we did that, we just went with it and got some snacks and drink rations from the supermarket because we both were feeling the arid state of the Japanese body. I chose three Japanese drinks to get: Calpis (yes, that’s almost "cow piss"), a milky-looking water drink? (a guy Natalie and I met today and I were trying to describe it but were at a loss for words… it says "Calpis Water" and "Happy Refresh" on the bottle… I think I’ll go with the "Happy Refresh"), Mitsuri Cider (I haven’t had it in a few years, but I think I remember liking it…), and Aquarius, a sports drink.

We dropped our stuff off back at the DK House and continued on our journey to find lunch, and it wasn’t until about 2:30-3:00 that we finally stumbled in a mall to eat. This mall, significantly closer to the DK House and to the station itself, was in fact the EXACT same mall as the one that we got bedding from earlier, which made Natalie angry and me laugh. They didn’t have as snazzy bedding choices as what we had picked, though, so the other play was justified.

Anyway, we ate fast food ramen at the bottom of the mall and ran into a bit of a bind. The Japanese separate their trash into plastic bottles, plastic-other-things, paper, burnable-other, and aluminum, and are especially hardcore about doing this in Warabi, according to S. Uzuki-san. Now, Natalie is lucky that she is already a rather light eater, but not when it comes to throwing away ramen. She had a looot of broth left over, and since broth isn’t even the throw-away category of burnable-other (that’s my term, not theirs... you know, in case you thought that was a really clever category), we didn’t know what to do with it, and, unlike eating at Makkudonarudo, we couldn’t just wait for someone else to get up and throw away their trash (yes, we did that), so we stood over by the trash can muttering English and looking at the signs really close up until one of the employees told us to put our dishes on this metal tray. Crisis averted. But oh! That reminds me! In case you like to judge restaurants by the quality of their napkins (I’m looking at you and that baseball place, PJC!), Japanese napkins (and, erg, Japanese toilet paper) are all, if you will, "one-ply".

So yeah, we got lunch and PILLOWS (woooooo! That REALLY completes the bedding situation) and headed back to Donkey Kong. There we sat around waiting for Jen to get back (which wasn’t very long). And we blogged. And blogged. And Jen got back. And we still blogged. And then it was something like 9:30 when we decided we’d better get up and find food before we all starved. Ended up we went to around where the station is and found a place to eat called "Sukiya". Here we all at curry instead of their advertised gyuu-niku-like dish that had a ton of mayonnaise on top of something, but so much mayonnaise that I didn’t know what was under it. The curry wasn’t too exciting, and once we found out that the pillow mall was closed early on Friday (… beats me), we just headed home to blog more, and the rest is history that you’ve already read (me falling asleep at the computer and writing nonsense). So I really DIDN’T write the end of the other day’s post on Friday! Shows how much you all were paying attention… jeez.

Before I move on to Saturday, I wanted to display some pictures of the BEAUUUTIFUL scenery of Warabi city, which I actually haven’t finished photographing, so they’ll just be added bonuses from now on. First, check out the wild beavers that roam the streets*. Fierce!!! Secondly, this is the bustling Friday-night nightlife that I was talking about when I was comparing Shibuya to Warabi. Maybe I was exaggerating a little when I said Shibuya was that much better**, especially when you can experience places like "Club Tira" that prominently display prehistoric creatures outside of their nightclub***.