Immediately after I finished my previous journal I had to run out the door of the hostel and make for the train. I was cutting it a little too close for comfort with the timing of my departure.  My flight was scheduled to be off the ground at 4:35 and it was going on 1:00 when I was finishing writing.  The trip on the train takes well over an hour ( Read more... )

My final day in Bangkok was an exercise in attempting to avoid as much of Songkran as possible.  I could think of nothing more heinous than sitting on a plane for something like 8 hours and feeling squirming soaking wet.  So I decided to make a late day of it, and started out with sleeping in late and doing a lengthy writeup (as per usual it seems ( Read more... )

Yesterday was my last official day in Tokyo and immediately after I posted my last update I had to download some pictures for about an hour and then jump on the train to Narita.  I had completely forgotten where the train was supposed to connect to take the local train to the airport (Aoto), and thus wound up transferring too early and getting on ( Read more... )

Yesterday was my last full day in Japan.

Given that I was half broke and my Suica card money needed to be saved for the trip out I didn't really have a lot of opportunity to go much of anywhere, so I spent the morning doing laundry, as I mentioned in my post yesterday.  The rest of the day I had a few missions of targeted shopping at the ( Read more... )

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Yesterday, as I was hanging in Harajuku it occurred to me that I was starting to look kind of haggard and even though I had been showering twice a day I was suffering from some serious b.o.  See, I made the fatal mistake of not packing deodorant before I left, mostly because I hardly use it at home.  But with all this tremendous amount of walking ( Read more... )

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Today was a day for Anime. Well, more it was a day of catching up with friends, and anime was just a pretext to do that ( Read more... )

The hostel that I'm staying at is part of a chain. There about four of these Khaosan hostels in Asakusa all around the same few blocks. Since they're such a popular destination they also run their own bar. However, given the desolation of tourist travel in Japan, the hostels are dead empty and what would normally be a busy Friday night was just a ( Read more... )

I woke up this morning at 6:00 am. Given that the capsule was pitch black it was impossible to know whether it was day or night. I had the horrible suspicion that it was only midnight or 1:00 in the morning and I had slept only a few hours. But no, I slept like 10 hours solid. It was great. The futon in the capsule bed is a little thin, but ( Read more... )