Nihon livin'

I've been in Japan for two and a half months now I think, and I'm becoming increasingly accustomed to the way of... being here. My room is a good evidence of this, since I was unaware until now that my organizing and structuring style seems to resemble that of how Japan is 'built'. Take Tokyo for instance; They cannot expand it borderwise, so they must build vertically. There's basically a "Tokyo 2" underneath the actual city, consisting of subways, stations, shopping malls,yakuza hidouts and daily necessities like manga outlets and maid cafées. Above the surface you've got the so called 'skyliners', which are trains that go above the city because they can't fit the rails anywhere else. In Chiba, the adjacent prefecture, the monorail even ventures in and out of buildings, which is pretty cool!

So, apparently I've subconsciously absorbed the Tokyoitian way of managing space, or the lack thereof... My books which I brought from Sweden (Thanks Sayam!) have a new home on top of my airconditioner and my creepy new Totoro friend is sitting comfortably up on my closet, glaring and plotting his sinister ways... My backpack and suitcase are mushed into the corner alongside my brand new shiny red guitar, while my towel is hanging from my ceiling lamp's wire. It looks pretty strange, but I'm very proud of having fitted a crapton of stuff into this tiny den.


Perhaps those days of playing tetris when I was younger weren't a waste after all. If only my stuff came in the shapes of rectangles and squares I might actually generate an additional free square metre which I could use for, well, anything! I could perhaps purchase a nice green plant or something else that's decorative enough to purge the overall feeling of being locked into a solitude cell in an insane asylum.

So what's going on? Next week two of our teachers invited us all to go drinking with them! Last time one of them got a little too drunk I think, since she fell down the stairs and all... but it's all good! This time we'll try to persuade them to have a drinking contest amongst the two of them.

So, nomimashou dayo. Mata ne!