June 23, 2007 Last night

So this will be my first weekend in Japan! Lots of people asked me what I will do these 2 days. I'm guessing mainly sleeping to finally get over the jetlag, and on Sunday, I might go to Osaka. Yesterday I learned that in Japan, shops are all opened on Sundays! What a pleasant surprise!

Eric went to Tokyo for the weekend to see friends, but asked me whether I was available on Tuesday night - he was going to ask a bunch of colleagues to go out for dinner or a drink together! He himself has only been at SBU for about 2 months, so for him as well it'll be an opportunity to integrate himself more.

Last night, I spent almost 5 hours in the internet caf`e, writing emails, posting stuff in the blog... and everything that I would normally use my laptop for... It has become routine that I sleep a while after work, so after two hours of sleeping, I was bright awake!

I'm not sure though whether it is especially healthy to be in the internet caf`e long stretches at one time... I read an article about the "social layer internet caf`e". Apparently, in Japan it's a lot cheaper to spend the night in an internet caf`e rather than to pay regular rent for a room. So some caf`es have started offering showers as well... And actually, I'm regularly surrounded by snoaring when I'm here. The article also said something about the risk of getting infected with tuberculosis. I don't know, I'm just hoping that the sniffing noises I hear from other cabins are not from people sniffing a line of crack or whatever. Hmpf. I don't find the caf`e especially cheap either. For about 5 hours, I spent around 12EUR... So my daily pay will get consumed almost exclusively for being on the internet...great.

Anyway, when I was ready to go home around 4 am, I was a little worried about walking alone at night as many people had warned me about that. Arima-san and Mutsuko-san had even shown me a tiny park where they told me not to go as there sometimes was passing a "crazy uncle" who was looking for sex. But when I left the building at 4:11am, THE SUN WAS COMING UP!! By the time I got home (about 5 minutes walking), it was bright daylight - unbelievable :o)
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Re-reading what I wrote, I think this doesn't really sound like me. I'm not really worried about either the internet caf`e nor the infection nor the walking at night time. There were just things crossing my mind, so mother: Don't worry :o)