After another lovely breakfast, I moved out of my host’s place and went to Phil’s to sort my bags. Ended up staying there all day watching anime because I was too lazy to explore anymore, haha. In the late evening I went back to Ebisu to get my bike and rode it up to Fiona’s place… 9km, sheesh. I should be getting pretty good at cardio after all ( Read more... )

We left the house a little later today, but I still spent literally half the day out. My host went shopping at Shinjuku so I went there as well with her and I wandered around the vicinity of the station, browsing the ridiculous number of shops and buying a couple of things that caught my fancy. My aim was to buy clothes for next year buuuut of ( Read more... )

My host had to be somewhere all day, so we left the house at about 9am and I wandered around the block a bit on my bike before deciding my thighs were way too tired to bike all day. Instead, I took a leisurely stroll to the flea market at Ohi Racecourse, meeting Phil at the train station on the way, and had a simple lunch from the convenience store ( Read more... )

I made it back to my hostel at about 5:30am, after getting the first train home. Jumped into bed and got up at 9am feeling surprisingly well-rested considering I only had like 3.5 hours of sleep. Anyway, I checked out of the hostel and left my large bag there, but took my laptop with me and biked to the hospital to meet up with the other students. ( Read more... )

I went to get my bike from Phil’s place today, and rode it to Kagurazaka to check the place out. It ended up being mostly food and some clothing stores for older women, so that was a bit disappointing. Still, while I was wandering around I went into an ink art gallery display that was staffed by old ladies who seemed very happy that a young person ( Read more... )

It was raining today, so I postponed leaving the hostel and ended up doing some torrenting before I left - boy, I’m glad I did! The speed is pretty darn fast in the morning when nobody is there, so I managed to finish downloading Hannibal and 2 anime series today. Successsss. Headed out at about 11am with the plan to go to Yanaka, but got ( Read more... )

I was going to go get my bike from Phil’s place, but decided just to rent one from near the hostel since that would cost the same as the train ride and the next few days might rain. I rode to Ryogoku to check out the sumo museum and saw a bunch of sumo wrestlers hanging out, which was interesting. Then I rode towards Tokyo station to exchange my ( Read more... )

Got up early this morning to go with my parents to Nippori so that they could take the train to the airport. We took a taxi to Mejiro, and from there it was pretty smooth sailing thanks to the fact that there were no subway lines so escalators and elevators were aplenty. I think my parents were pleasantly surprised too, because on the way to our ( Read more... )

I left Kyoto early today in order to make it in time for Spark9 at Tokyo Big Sight. It was a pretty weird feeling to hop on a train and be in Tokyo in a couple of hours, but that’s shinkansen for you. Met up with Fiona over there and we had the time of our lives (well, our inner fangirls did at least) browsing the numerous halls filled with ( Read more... )

Today we did a sightseeing trip around Kyoto which ended up being much better than I expected. I had dreaded going to Kinkakuji and all those other places I’d already been to like twice, but this time we hit all the places that I hadn’t been to yet (Rengo-en AKA Sanjusanshitsu, Fushimi Inari and Arashiyama) so I enjoyed myself a lot. I must say, ( Read more... )