Laundry

Day 2

I got to talk to my sister over skype, and I tried to catch up on my blog.

I asked Tim to show me how to work the washing machine. In Japan, they don't have driers, they just have washers that can also dry your clothes. It is tiny, and of course, all the buttons are labeled in Japanese. I like to follow the instructions on the labels of my shirts to wash them, so Tim took a picture of the buttons and emailed it to a friend to translate so that we could figure out how to wash cold on a delicate cycle. The nice thing about the bathroom is that it comes equipped with a bar to hang clothes on to dry. So instead of having a rack in my bedroom like at home, I can let the clothes dry in the bathroom.

We went out to a store to pick up an adapter for my laptop plug (Tokyo has two prong electric outlets, not three prong). The interesting thing is the elevator. Everyone crams into the elevator when it opens. They also hold the buttons to keep the doors open or to close the doors. In America, we would just stick our hand out to stop the door from closing, and usually, you wait for the next elevator if it is too crowded. There isn't the same consideration for personal space here.

Bakeries exist in every grocery store, at the train stations, and on street corners not occupied by con-bean-ies (convenience stores, aka 7-Eleven). You can buy just a slice of cake, which is perfect. However, it is not pronounced cake, but cak-e, where you say the e. Cheesecake is pronounced cheese-u-cak-e. Chocolate is choco-reto. Strawberry is suto-raw-berry. This is the fun world of Engrish. I haven't figured out if key lime exists in Japan.

We ate dinner at an Italian restaurant called Emilia. It was good, I had tortellini with a spinach white sauce.