Small Beginnings

I managed to make my way from Narita airport to Shinjuku all by myself. Thankfully, most locations were written in English as well as Japanese. I had about 5 hours until Drew & Alisha arrived from Hamamatsu. While I wanted to wander about the city, I had +100lbs. of luggage that made mobility rather difficult. The lockers in the station were too small to fit my largest bag, but after much pushing and shoving, I managed to smoosh my other bags into a 500 yen locker. From there I eased myself into the culture transition by hanging outside a nearby Starbucks drinking a latte, eating a ginger pork pie, and finishing my book.

After meeting up with Drew and Alisha, we made our way to their friend Mike's house. Or tried to, We wandered for a good 30 minutes looking for his apartment that was a supposed 7 minute walk from the station. Sure, we had the address, but since buildings in Japan are addressed in the order they are built, knowing it was pointless. You have to have a map. Even with a map, locating a building can be tricky and Mike's apartment was no exception. Luckily, a late night jogger saw our utterly lost faces and stopped to point us in the right direction.

Mike had predicted that his apartment would be too small to sleep all four of us, so he had already left to sleep at his boyfriend's house while we stayed at his. We thought this was silly until we opened the door to his place. It was the tiniest apartment I had ever seen in my life. The standing area of the kitchen at the entrance was perhaps a two-foot square, and the living room/bedroom/everything else was 7 feet by 10feet in area. With my luggage in the room, a fourth person would have been impossible. After dropping the luggage off, we walked down to the 7-11, bought a 6-pack of Asahi, caught up, watched a little tv, before going to bed side-by-side, like little sardines.