So today was my first real day in Tokyo. The typhoon past over last night with little ado and today it was just hot and humid. I spent the morning wandering around Shinjuku looking at stuff and casually looking for a new hotel. I saw one that said “business hotel” in English on the sign outside so I figured it was worth a shot to see if they spoke English. They didn’t, not really even one word, but I did manage to get a single room for two nights at about $60/night. Not so bad, about twice what the hostel costs but I have my own room and my own bathroom and no curfew and it’s in a more lively neighborhood. I hope I can find my way back. I posted some pictures and comments to Flickr.
It really is true that hardly anyone speaks English here. The English t-shirts people wear here are .. hilarious/embarassing/frightening. I went t-shirt shopping a bit near Ueno station. It was a big bust because they all had really stupid stuff written on them in English. And it’s a good thing nobody speaks English here otherwise the t-shirst people wear would probably offend a lot of people. I can’t remember exactly, but there was one that says something about a good pickup line being “you can fuck my nasty hole till it’s raw” or something like that. Damn. That’s pretty hard core. You’d probably get told to cover that t-shirt up in America. There was this 80 year old man with his wife wearing a t-shirt that said “FAG” in enourmous pink letters and another Japanese schoolgirl with a t-shirt that said “asian girl including happy ending.” Amazing. I hope for their sake they don’t wear those t-shirts to America. And it reinforces my aversion to buying t-shirst in America with foreign language writing on it that I can’t read.
Food has been slighly difficult only because I can’t read/speak Japanese. But thank god for vending machines. They are EVERYWHERE here. Literally everywhere. Even the most remote place I’ve been has at least 10 on every block. Some of the food places in Shinjuku have vending machines where you order your food, then you sit down and a waitor brings it to you. Which would be great for me except the only one I’ve found so far didn’t have pictures, just japanese characters. :( I need a vending machine with pictures. I’ll have to study my Japanese to see if I can manage to order some vegetarian soba. I know what I order in San Francisco, sansai soba, but I haven’t seen anything that looked like it on any of the pictures. I ended up at McDonalds. :) I think I realized after I ordered that the girl behind the counter was kinda dissapointed that I didn’t use more English with her. I did a lot of pointing. I did have had some good soba from 7/11 though. Yes, 7/11 is universal as far as I can tell. I think they have one on the moon already. The specifics of what they sell changes, but the reason you go there doesn’t.
My new “business” hotel doesn’t seem to have wifi and since they don’t speak any English I don’t have high hopes for making it work there. Supposedly there’s lots of internet cafes around but I’m not really sure how they work yet. The guys at the hostel were saying you can sleep in them for ~500 yen. Interesting. Anyway, off to do some more exploring.
I read the bit you wrote about the t-shirts to Joe and Paul. We laughed heartily.