It rained pretty hard the beginning of the 2nd week. I thought I’d brave a little rain to go see the Imperial Palace grounds in Chiyoda but it poured. I ended up wandering over to Akihabara because it was close by and because I hadn’t been there before (Akihabara is a famous district where people dress up as anime characters and the like). I paused under a few overpasses to escape the rain on my way there.
It ended up being a little obnoxious. Maybe I would have enjoyed it better if it wasn’t raining so much. I darted past some loudly-costumed female anime characters handing out advertising, and found a small mall. I needed to buy some sweatshirts because in order to go to a Japanese gym I would need to hide my tattoos. Apparently, even if you hide them, if someone finds out you have them, you still have to leave. This really sucks if you’ve signed up for a membership, because essentially it means your membership will be terminated, sometimes without refund. So I found a Uniqlo inside the mall and bought some sweatshirts.
On my way home I found a ramen shop that looked good. It turned out to be a burnt ramen shop which I’d heard about. I was supposed to meet a friend from SF for burnt ramen, but flaked because of the rain. One thing I like about many ramen shops in Japan are the vending-machine-style ordering kiosks. They have pictures so you don’t have to worry if you can’t read kanji. Turns out I had forgotten how to use these machines since my last trip. The helpfulness of the guy at the door didn’t mesh well with my nervousness and I dropped my money everywhere like an idiot. As I tried to talk to the guy, it started to occur to me how much Japanese I still didn’t know despite the amount of studying I had under my belt. All said and done, I got my ramen, but felt strangely down about my lack of Japanese communication skills. I proceeded to eat the ramen incorrectly (not slurping the noodles at all), and feel foolish. Silly, I know, but at least the ramen was delicious.
That night while cleaning up after dinner, I remembered I still needed to figure out where to put the garbage once full. Well, by now the kitchen was getting a little crowded with full garbage bags. So I sent my Airbnb host a message and did some research on google for Setagaya garbage management.
What I found out was, you have to sort your trash. The categories for sorting are, combustable, non-combustable, and recyclables: plastic, paper, and glass. Most of my trash was combustable: non-recyclable plastic and paper, food stained containers, food scraps, and the like. But I did have some AAA batteries that died which I will at some point have to take to a retail store that handles battery disposal. Combustable garbage is picked up on Wednesdays and Saturdays from a bin that looks like a wide metal mailbox outside the apartment. Recyclables are collected on Mondays or you can take them to retail stores that handle disposal.
The following day I had to do laundry. Figuring out the washing machine wasn’t too hard, I was able to find general guides online listing the typical kanji found on Japanese washers and what they meant. The washing machine itself is a small, squat little thing, located outside the front door of the apartment. It takes about 30 minutes to wash a full load. There isn’t a dryer though, so clothes need to be air dried. When it was time to dry my clothes for the first time, I found they didn’t all quite fit on the drying poles out back. I did my best trying to fit everything but had to resort to drying my socks on a towel on the floor.
The next couple nights for dinner I tried my hand at a some new dishes. I made a really good miso ramen. I bought the noodles already made, called chuka-men here in Japan, and made the broth from scratch. Miso broth, noodles, a hard-boiled egg, and some sliced pork belly.
Ingredients for the broth base: Ground pork, garlic, ginger, green onions, dried kombu.
Ingredients to add to the broth base: Awase miso (red and white miso mixed), sri racha, soy sauce, raw sugar.
Ingredients to add while broth is simmering and noodles are boiling: chopped garlic and sesame oil.
Boiling the ground pork, etc., for the broth base.
Miso ramen with pork belly and egg. Very umami!
After having sorted out the small stuff, laundry, garbage, groceries, I still had to figure out where to go to lift weights. I looked at a few options and practiced some Japanese I’d need for attempting to get a gym membership. But then I saw there were public sports centers that had weights, and it would be cheaper than getting a membership at a gym. I found one in Shibuya, just a few train stations away, so I decided to go check it out.
The walk from the train station to the Sports Center was a nice mixture of city and nature. The first few blocks were through bustling businesses and the rest of the walk was through tree-lined bike paths. I arrived at the sports center after a 10 minute walk. It was a large concrete, modern looking building with a wide flight of steps. In the entrance was a vending-machine-type kiosk where it looked like I was supposed to buy my ticket. I saw a button for Adult: 400 yen. I put the money in, pressed the illuminated button, and out printed a small blue ticket.
The inside of the sports center was bright with sun coming through the glass facade of the building. I could smell chlorine and hear a lot of activity echoing though the tall white space. This was like a rec center. I went to the front desk and asked in Japanese, “excuse me, where are the free-weights”. The woman at the counter started to answer in Japanese hesitantly, but then a man chimed in who spoke pretty good english. “We don’t have any free weights, just dumbbells”. “Ah, so no barbells?”, I asked. “No.” “Ok, where are they?” “Upstairs.”
The weight room was up the stairs, tucked away at the end of a hall and around the corner. It was a smallish space with tall ceilings. There was a man at a desk by the entrance who greeted me and took my ticket. He also spoke some english. “Is this your first time here?”, he asked. I said it was and he had me fill out a registration form (it looked like it was just for their records), and handed me a laminated sheet that was printed in english titled training room guidelines.
I’ve been using this gym for a few days and there are some differences I found fascinating. First the gym guidelines. You can’t stay on the same machine and do multiple consecutive sets. You have to get off the machine and wipe it down with a cloth and either go use another machine, or go take a short breather away from the machine and come back to it after. This ensures that nobody is hogging any machine, I kind of liked that. Another one is you can’t use your phone to take selfies of yourself flexing (or other people mostly). And last, you can’t have tattoos (not even hidden ones). I’m keeping mine hidden and hoping my secret stays safe.
I like the locker rooms too. They’re very clean. The entrance to the locker rooms is a wooden sliding door, and you have to take your shoes off. The lockers are free. You put in a 100 yen coin and you get it back once you replace your key.
I feel good about being here until the end of December now, I was dreading it initially. I love being on the train and watching the intricate city scape pass by. I love catching a glimpse down a narrow, leaf-darkened, paper-lantern-strewn path, clenched inside of the bismuth of newer buildings. I love walking through this urban bramble that can feel initially claustrophobic but end up cozy. Everyday now as I’m walking or commuting, I just think it’s so cool that it feels like I’m living here.
