entry nº 22c // 20180805

[part 3 of an ongoing series]

•so yeah, i show up to in that hotel lounge/lobby area. everyone’s drunk. it’s loud. what happened? hard to say. so the story is, HEATHER™ was in japan filming something with her friend MATT, who as it turns out is also from NH? salem i think. or hudson? he was funny and pretty nice. and so matt and all these other americans were there as part of some program where you pay money and they basically ship you around the world for a year, one country each month, and they set you up with a little apartment and a shared office space in each location. i keep wanting to call it “CITY YEAR” but that’s a completely different thing. so all the people there in kyoto had just come from maybe croatia? [fully misremembering/guessing, sorry] a week or so prior. 

•it’s time for din din, so we try to get matt to go, but it’s like drunk party zone in there, and it seems like everything happens in groups w/ this crowd, so going out to get dinner is this process of like checking with everybody else to see who wants to go, waiting for them, reminding people that we want to go, etc. like, if you’re in the midst of that party drunk big group amorphous plan haze atmosphere you probably don’t even notice it, but coming in from the outside is like, come on guys, tighten up. 

•but we finally made it out of there, and went out for conveyor belt sushi, which is always tasty and inexpensive and fun. started to get a bit of the feeling of what kyoto is like: lots of cozy little quiet back streets, much bigger downtown area than fukuoka, cool little nightlife-kind of area along this canal, all sorts of people out and about. you could feel the increased tourist presence, too, for sure. after sushi we walked around and ducked into a little hole-in-the-wall, quirky bar called “paper moon.” matt’s friend, who, holy cow i can’t even remember his name now? but he was cool and funny and i got a good vibe from him, came to meet up with us. moved on from there to another even cozier, more hole-in-the-wall-y place. it was fun. it felt like “i traveled to japan!” in way that’s very different from my life in fukuoka. 

•got back to my pod in the capsule hotel + hit the sack for the night. tight little nook setup that’s taken up entirely by a bed with a shelf above it and a slide-out shelf for luggage and stuff below. the bed transitions via motor, hospital-bed-style, between an upright “sofa” position and a flat “bed” position, albeit controlled via an app on the ipod touch they give you when you check in. very high-tech. you could also set an alarm so you’re waken up by your bed sliding up into sofa mode as the lights in your pod gradually fade on. gave this a shot that first night, but really the thing that ends up waking you up is the sound of the motors whirring to life, more than anything. still, though! 

to be continued