Kashiwa

Tonight we had decided to try something different accommodation wise and checked ourselves into Tokyo Kiba Hotel, a capsule hotel!  As we hadn’t stayed in one before, the lady at the front desk kindly showed us the ropes, all of which were mostly the same except that instead of having a room we were both in the dog house!

We only had to venture across the road to the nearest sushi train and spent the remainder of the night watching movies in our box and watching as mostly other travellers, and not suited businessmen as previously thought, trickled in and crawled into their box.  It was at good option as at Y4,000, that’s a bit under half the cost of a standard business hotel.

Day 254 – Sleepy shopping and photo booth fun

This morning we checked out of our box and moved our things out to Kashiwa, about an hour on the train north east of Tokyo, to near where Shouko was living with her brother.  She had managed to get two days off work to hang out with us, but not easily.  The poor thing had been at work until 5am prior to meeting us!

We met in the lobby of our hotel at midday and headed out to Shouko’s local shopping mall for a look around and some lunch.  After a couple of hours walking around Shouko looked knackered, so we suggested she went home for some more sleep and we met up later for dinner.

Vegemite was $11 in Canada, here a more reasonable $5.

At about 8pm we met up again for sushi train and finally were able to order some of the more interesting stuff you have to order specially that doesn’t come on the ordinary train.

Each one of those white strips is a fishy!

Fish roe marinated in something lemony.

After sushi train we went for a stroll around the area and had some photo fun in one of those funky photo booths were there’s a full body blue screen, a range of scenery and you can graffiti on the pictures before they are printed!  What happened to ordinary old black and white and pulling fun faces?  After that we wandered into a $2 shop type place that must have sold absolutely everything imaginable.  It was called something that sounded like “Donkey” and is apparently a bit of an institution.  Tired again, we all hit the sack reasonable early, ready for our day trip tomorrow.