I’m sitting in the train carriage on the first leg of my journey to Japan. So far only one hour spent travelling but at least another fifteen to look forward to. Here’s hoping that my accommodation will be warm and welcoming; perhaps with soft music playing in the background to increase the atmosphere and comfort me thousands of miles from home. I hope to be proved wrong. First of all there is my slightly ominous date of arrival in Japan, the 1st April. April fools. I still half expect the airline to spring some massive practical joke and take me to Siberia where I will be forced to copy out kanji all day long, hard labour indeed. The sad thing is that after the debacle of getting to France, having only five days between receiving results and the start of term and my French professor sending me to the wrong university this wouldn’t actually surprise me.
Although this time things are more organised and at least I have an address to go to in Tokyo. Unfortunately typing the postcode in on the excellent Google Street View reveals that my accommodation is in fact a garage (Tokyo 192-0351). Still this will almost definitely be an improvement over my previous accommodation/closet in France which had a shower in the kitchen, which regularly flooded the floor. And the Kitchen merely consisted of a fridge and a camping stove with a bit of cardboard above it to stop any steam from the pots and pans soaking into the ceiling. It didn’t work. Things might not be so bad in the garage after all, roomier at the least.
