Tokyo Heat

It's Thursday morning in Tokyo and I'm getting ready for school. One of the things I do every morning is check the weather, but there's not really a reliable internet source for the weather here. For example, one site I looked at said a high of about 85 today, while another said about 105 with the heat index. But, I don't need the internet to tell me that it is going to be HOT today - it was super hot yesterday and today is supposed to be the same. I know being from NC I'm supposed to be used to the heat and humidity, but in NC I am driving around in air-conditioned cars and walking from one ice-cold building to another. Here, I have to walk 15 minutes in the morning heat and then get on a muggy crowded train. It's not the most enjoyable way to start off a morning but I guess I'm just going to have to get used to it!

This week has been good so far. Monday was another friend's birthday (we actually have three Monday birthdays in a row in June), so after class we had dinner at a yakiniku place. "Yakiniku" basically means grilled meat - at the restaurant you have a little stove thing in front of you and you grill your own meat! It was super delicious and I became quite the pro at grilling. After dinner, I headed back home to do some homework and get to sleep early.

The Yakiniku grill!

Tuesday morning I got ready for school and ended up walking to the station with three other people (normally it's just one other). As we were walking, we were talking about how the commute the previous day had been especially bad when we rounded the corner to the station and saw... a madhouse. Apparently there was an accident on our train line somewhere, which means all the trains have to stop for a long time and it causes huge delays. To get into my station, you have to walk up some stairs, across a hallway, and then through the gates and down more stairs. People were overflowing all the way from the actual train platform out through the front entrance. It was crazy. This actually has happened one time previously this semester, but I was staying at the hotel with my parents so I didn't have to take the train to school. It was really hot and I already knew I was going to miss my quiz at the beginning of Japanese class, and since our sensei doesn't let us make them up I decided just to take the morning off and rest in my room.

Later Tuesday morning I headed back to the station, which was clear by that time, and went to school for lunch and my afternoon anthropology class. We actually had a pretty interesting discussion about electricity conservation, which is being stressed heavily this summer. After class I headed back home to go for a run. I ran to the river again, which is pretty much a straight shot from my dorm. On the way there, I engaged in a tug of war over sidewalk space with myself, a biker, and a fence (I lost, the fence won) and got a pretty nasty bruise from that. On the way back, I actually managed to get lost some how - I'm still not sure how it happened, but I eventually found something that looked familiar and made my way back home. It was pretty hot but it was still a good run. I picked up some food for dinner at the grocery store and spent the rest of night doing homework (actually being productive for once!).

Wednesday (yesterday) was super hot, as I mentioned. I had Japanese in the morning and then had the rest of the day free before my 5pm class - I had done my homework the night before for once and there wasn't an organized CIEE activity that afternoon. So, I had lunch in the cafeteria (oishikute yasui - delicious and cheap!) and then headed to Ginza to explore. Ginza is the super high-end shopping district of Japan, so I was pretty much just window shopping. I went to the Mitsukoshi department store, which is pretty famous and has 12 floors and two towers of wondrous consumer goods. I saw some shoes for $100 and others for $4000, and that was probably just the low end. The basement floor is a "food garden" that is actually pretty reasonably priced, and I got some souvenirs to take home. Then I walked around the rest of the store gawking at the prices, but I didn't feel as out of place since I was carrying at Mitsukoshi shopping bag :).

After I had finished my mental list of things to buy when I win a bajillion dollars, I headed back to school to print my homework for class and relax outside. It was really hot (have I mentioned that?) but it was nice in the shade. Then I had my NGO class, which was pretty interesting, and I came home with some friends and had dinner at the ramen place. (It has a name I guess but we all just call it "the ramen place," so it will continue to be called that in this blog. Then, I spent the rest of the night stressing about my final paper for that class - my professor originally said 12 pages, and since all university students think in terms of double-spaced pages it didn't seem too bad, but yesterday he revised it to at least 6000 words, which is closer to 20 pages double-spaced. Ah. Time to get started... thankfully it's a group project, but we still need to get moving on it! Time for school now though~ mata!