Personal Room

After a year and a half in Tokyo, it finally happened: I missed the last train.

Back home, it was never an issue. One bitched about how long one might have to wait until the next night tram, but it does come eventually (except when it doesn't, but that's a completely different story). Waiting for 22 minutes might look like an eternity when your feet hurt and you have thin soles and it's snowing, but it's not really all that long.

In Tokyo, everything stops around midnight, and it doesn't budge until five hours later. And while back home I might have chosen to walk if I didn't feel like gambling for a night tram (or, when I moved, I might just have walked home), it's not an option here: my home is nowhere near walking distance from, well, anything.

What happened was this: I went to milonga with a friend (last one [milonga, not friend], as it turns out, as she ships out to Dominican Republic in a couple of days. "See you in two years", she said, but... "then, who alive, who dead", as my people are wont to say). Milongas are rather famous for starting late and ending later still, and it holds true even in Tokyo (except for the previous one, where suddenly everyone went home at 22-23h - what's up with that?), and... well, not much to tell really, the first sentence tells it all. I got stuck in Ikebukuro at thirty past midnight.

Now, I evaluated my options, which I all knew only theoretically by now. I could take a cab. It would get me home, and cost me quite a bit. That was the usual recourse for my tango friend, but she was always all grumbly about how much money she ends up wasting on it.

Also, there are hotels all over Tokyo, in a variety of flavours. In order of decreasing price and increasing sleaziness: There's real hotels, which cost real money. There's love hotels, but I guess it's strange if you don't have company. And there's capsule hotels, where (I am told) you can hear a roomful of strangers snore.

Another option was, I could crash in a karaoke box; but I didn't really want to sing, and karaoke boxes are kind of loud. Normally you don't hear other people singing, but only because there's someone in your own box yelling his or her heart out. (Actually, most people I went with sing very very well; only some actually yell. Details.) If you're not singing, the bloody karaoke machine still insists on playing loud music by itself. (I learned that when I went to karaoke with a friend, and we were trying to have a conversation. We quickly gave up and just sang.) And if you manage to turn that down, you start hearing people yelling their hearts out in the neighbouring boxes. Not really a place I would go to spend a restful night; but it's an option. A lot of karaoke places have a night rate, where you pay a fixed amount for the six or so hours past the point of no return; it's not that cheap, but if you like karaoke, it's a nice enough option.

Then there are manga cafes, or internet cafes - most offer both, to be clear, so these are largely synonyms. You rent a cubicle, kind of like in a internet cafe most of my readers are used to, and there's a computer you can use. That's where the similarity stops, because in a western internet cafe you can't normally borrow a comic book, and they don't normally work 24/7. They also have a night rate, so you can rent your cubicle and just crash until your train starts rolling.

Anyway, as all this was going through my head, fighting for dominance in my mind's arena, I noticed a sign fortuitously just in front of me: Personal Rooms, in B1 (first floor underground). The terms of use were also posted, and... it's a kind of internet cafe. Why didn't they just say so? And they had a "night course" for ¥2000, which I thought was pretty decent for renting a room for up to twelve hours (10pm-10am). You could even borrow a DVD. Each customer even gets one "joke goods" for free. Huh. So, in I went.

The thing I should have realised was this: There were about 25 shelves crammed into a small reception room, with the composition as follows: 3 shelves of manga, 1 shelf of foreign movies, 1 shelf of domestic movies; and the rest was occupied by... another kind of cinematography. Mostly domestic, but one shelf was again reserved for countries where blonditude does not necessarily come from a bottle.
(I like blonditude, and I don't care that it's not a word. It sounds way better than blondness. Blonditude. Blonditude. Or perhaps, blondosity, for certain people.) Next to the counter window which was at the right height for two bellies to converse face-to-face (one has to love the Japanese penchant for privacy), the wall sported the menu of "joke goods", most of which were in an amusing cylindrical shape.

At the time I registered (or rather, shown my ticket bought at the automatic ticket selling machine to the belly behind the counter), I was given the choice of a reclining mat or a massage chair. Now massage chairs are supposed to be good for relaxing, but since I wanted to at least try to sleep (insomnia still going strong), I was definitely more inclined to recline, and declined a massage chair. I ordered a wake-up call, since the rates for oversleeping are draconian when compared to what I paid for the whole night (¥500 for 30 minutes).

I was then shown to my personal room. (Actually, I was shown the door to the half-metre wide corridor where the rooms were. I entered and locked the door behind me, then spent the next five minutes trying to kick back on the reclining mat (since 80% of the width of the room were taken by the mat, leaving just about a foot width of "passageway". Above one's knees there are a DVD player, a keyboard, and a huge LCD TV; and next to one's elbow there's a phone, an ashtray and two (!) boxes of wipes. In case of any sudden leakages. The room stank a bit, but luckily only of old tobacco (one of rare opportunities for me to put luck and tobacco in the same sentence).

All in all, a minor adventure was had. It's cheap, and it could have been much worse. For instance, if I was a woman, I suppose.

In closing, two words: Doomsday sucks. If you ever find yourself in a situation where you have a choice between porn and Doomsday, pick porn. Seriously. Porn is way more believable and has a way better plot.

Pizza

Saturday was a cool day. We had an all-day gaming event, and after that people said there was this cool little Burmese restaurant. So we went. I hardly even knew there was such a thing as "Burmese cuisine", but apparently even people from Burma do eat, so there we went. It was a couple of minutes away from Takadanobaba station, and apparently it is a Burmese restaurant heaven, as there is at least 3-4 more in the vicinity. It was a first time I've been to that station, but seeing how there's over a hundred stations in Tokyo and I don't get out all that much, it's nothing to be surprised about.

The restaurant was small, but kind of cozy. Dalmatian feel, almost. We ordered a bunch of different things and split it between the six of us, so we had a lot of variety in our dinner. But I was particularly impressed by two things. One was a drink, and was listed on the menu as "Grass Jelly". (I actually wrote "Glass Jelly" first, then corrected it, and it's not even the first time I did it; I have no idea why. I guess I'm becoming more Japanese by the minute.) Anyway, Grass Jelly (and again I had to actively control my fingers to keep them away from the L key) looks like water with bits of black jelly suspended in it. It tastes very sweet, and the closest thing to compare with would be the Icelandic lichen syrup. But without the whole coughing crap.

The other thing was tea leaf salad. Yummy! Don't ask me to describe how it tasted like, I just can't. There was a lot of things in it: peanuts, sesame seeds, rice vinegar, probably oil, and several varieties of green. I totally enjoyed it.

Speaking of restaurants, I have to make a presentation for my Japanese class, and I'm doing one on sarma. Like a real scientist, I have to cover my bases, and so I think I'll be going tomorrow (or some time soon if I don't get a table) to a Croatian restaurant. Err, make that "the" Croatian restaurant - since there's just the one in Japan. Sarma should be a bit pricey, but I miss it, and it's not that different from some other restaurants I've been to (like, oh, I don't know, Burmese). Good thing is, I actually managed to save some little money, and also I'll be getting my part-time job salary from next month, so it should be all good. I don't even spend that much on the dentist as I thought I would.

The dentists scare me, in couple of different ways. First, I was scared of the prices - I am going to a hi-tech private dentist, and they said there's a lot of work to be done in my mouth, so I was afraid I'm going to leave a lot of money there. But it turns out that I was wrong about that - the dentist turned out to be not only quite skilled, but also very cheap in comparison to back home. So now I'm scared about getting a nerve pulled, which is scheduled for the day after tomorrow. I'm pretty nervous about that. I hope I don't lose my nerve, and get a nervous breakdown. Waiting for something like that is quite a nerve-wrenching experience, you know?

Okay, enough of that. While on the topic of money and work in mouth - last week I was at a gaming till rather late, and then decided to walk back home from Shibuya rather than brave the overcrowded last trains. It's just two stations, which translates to about... oh, maybe 20 minutes, maybe half an hour, I never measured. Anyway, I was passing the Love Hotel Hill (actually, the Japanese name is Hill where the Road Starts, or something like that, but it's universally called LHH by the gaijin population, I believe), and I got offered マッサージとブロージョッブ by a party previously unknown to me. That's a first. Wasn't even very expensive, I think. If I understood her correctly, it was actually about the same price as StarCraft: the Boardgame: Brood War expansion. But I had a book to go home to, so I did not partake of the services.

But was I tempted? Hell, it's like finding a piece of American pizza lying on the ground just inside Disneyland.

I mean, it's pizza!

But, on the other hand, it's full of fat, probably with germs on it, and you have to pay the considerable entrance fee to get to it.

And then you start thinking about Prosciutto Speciale back home... :(