Living Shinjuku

I am exhausted. Today was exactly like yesterday...but worse. It was raining. The typhoon from Taipei apparently went through Korea and followed us to Japan. I woke up early to get to the Shinjuku Ward Office when they opened at 8:30 AM and everything that followed was miserable. I'm not gonna go into it, but I did successfully overpay for cell phones! Yay. Another day without a cell phone and I think we would have faded into obscurity. We ended up picking the cheapest cell phones they had there, but these phones are actually really sweet. Very few people here have smart phones because these flip phones basically do everything my smart phone does. We actually got our cell phones in Okubo because we were looking at other apartments around there (just in case Prospect Axe falls through).

The unit in Okubo and the area were pretty nice. A lot of Tokyo, Okubo included, is like a collection of little towns mashed together. Okubo is definitely an area with a lot of foreigners, except in this case they're basically all East Asian. There are so many Koreans around there and everybody in the Softbank store was speaking Korean. I mostly communicated to the vendor in Korean and totally got ripped off cuz my level of the language doesn't cut it when making cell phone contracts. Of course, our bag of goodies at the end of it all included Shin Ramyun.

While we were waiting for our phones to activate (one hour), we went to eat dinner at a vending machine order store. Basically the entire menu is on the vending machine. You feed money, press the button, and get a ticket. By giving the server your ticket when you're seated, they'll know what food to send to you. Simple but probably unnecessary. The food was pretty solid but the vending machine thing is definitely a gimmick. My two day experience in Tokyo is analogous to this one machine: a little flashy but a huge waste of time and resources.

I'm not sure how I feel about living in Okubo. It's not that I don't want to be around Korean people, just that it's not the Tokyo experience I envisioned.

I also had my first encounter with my exchange school, Waseda University. The campus is just as confusing as the rest of Tokyo. It feels like it's been laid out with no real direction and the squished into a city block. Well that's my excuse for being late to orientation. I ended up meeting a bunch of the business exchange students and should be hanging out with them shortly. Today was orientation, and it wasn't really that useful. I'm glad I met the people I did but had to bail early to meet with our real estate agent.

On our way back home today we experienced our first real Shinjuku rush hour. Shinjuku station is enormous and I never imagined that it could really be that busy but I was really really wrong. I think I got a much better idea of just how many people live in Tokyo. The station has set world records for most commuters serviced and after today, I can totally see how that's possible.

I will get my bank account tomorrow. I have some other business to take care of but that's the final urgent matter, other than housing, and maybe I will get a chance to actually settle down and enjoy this city. Also, I have to go back to Softbank in Omotesando where they speak English to cancel all this crap.