Memoirs from the Land of Suits and Ramen, Thu, 31 Oct 2013 | written by Simon
Simon with Eva at a City, Park in Asia, Japan

And we’re off!.
At the airport – tired but happy
At the airport – tired but happy

The journey to Japan starts with an early morning wake up and a slightly less than usual-stressed Eva. Mid landing in Paris: Charles de Gaule airport is huge and rather boring. Now onto the big plane. Fortunately we have spaces in the first row with a lot of leg space – useful on a 12 hour long flight to Tokyo. Eva watches movies and I’m marking essays. Yes. My students had their essay deadline yesterday, which means I need to mark them while in Japan. Might as well start early. The first few I marked were rather horrible, so hey for a good start… At least my collection of silly excerpts from student essays got richer. Also, the Air France food turned out to be very good.

We didn’t get much sleep during the flight, maybe an hour, and we landed at 8am, having still all day ahead of us. Getting to town from the airport was easy, largely thanks to Eva’s awesome planning. Some interesting views on the way: rice fields, houses with curvy roofs – definitely Japan!

Rice fields – definitely Japan
In between the skyscrapers

We arrived at Tokyo central station, left our baggage in a locker and went for a walk around town. The plan was to stroll around for a bit, eat something and go to the imperial gardens. So stroll we did. Tokyo, although it’s a huge city, is actually quite nice – in between all the skyscrapers there is a host of small narrow streets with all sorts of interesting shops and bars. We walked for about an hour and decided to get lunch. Then suddenly, so did everyone else. As we learned later, all corporations have lunch breaks at noon, which means that within one hour all those small streets with bars become rivers of hungry humans, and all bars have discouragingly long queues in front of them. But we did find something in the end – and here starts a whole new adventure: Japanese food.

The Menu

First, the outside. All bars and restaurants have menus on the outside. The menus have pictures (thank gods for that, because all dish names are given only in kanji), but not only that – most places have life scale plastic models of the food they serve in the windows! It’s great, we know what we’re ordering, and ordering itself is easy even if the staff speak no English – just point. The food is really weird and delicious. Today we had a huge bowl of ramen so full of vegetables and noodles there was hardly any broth in it, and a plate of mystery veg in black bean sauce. I took pictures. I’ll be reporting on what we eat every day.

Imperial palace from the outside

In the meantime it started to rain properly, and we got a bit wet on the way to the imperial gardens. Moreover, in vain – they were closed. More and more sleepy, we moved through a park where an exhibition of flowers and garden concepts was held, and started walking towards the waterfront. Never reached it. We almost fell asleep on a Hibiya park bench, everything hurt, we were dreaming while walking… that was 26 hours without sleep and a lot going on at this point. We decided to start moving towards the place where we were suppressed to meet our couchsurfing host and just wait there.

Here’s an idea for your new garden
So serious! Seiichi insisted we take a pic like that.
Seiichi, a nice 45 years old guy, turned out to be a pretty chilled dude. He let us into his flat, and after a short chat, started packing, saying he works night shifts, so he’s off to work now, and then he’s going hillwalking for the weekend, so here are the keys and see you on Monday. Ha! That was a surprise! And so we had a flat in central Tokyo all to ourselves, for free.
Living room – two thirds of the entire flat
Kitchen and bathroom

A really tiny flat, mind you. I thought our new flat in Edinburgh is small, but it’s a villa compared to this one. Looks like about 15 square metres to me: 3×3 room, a small bathroom and a tiny kitchen annex. Wow. Also, the flat is fully automatic: remote controlled heating and AC, digitally set shower temperature, a microwave that recognises the weight of the food you put in and adjusts the cooking time, and a toilet with more buttons than my PC. Yes, the toilet seats in this country in are heated up and have built in bidet with three direction settings, adjustable water strength and temperature, a running water sound, and ten other buttons the use of which I can’t make out. This is freaky and awesome at the same time.

We were extremely tired, so soon after Seiichi left, we just collapsed on the thin futon mattresses that took pretty much the entirety of the floor space in this flat.

Good night!