How soon the mighty have fallen.

Yesterday, we were living like rock stars at the top of their careers. Many rock stars can stay at the top for years, sometimes even decades before the heroin and groupies take their toll and the band loses its momentum and winds up penniless and living in squalor. It took us one day.

We checked out of the Park Hyatt unceremoniously and walked around Shinjuku, aimlessly killing time since we couldn’t check into our new accommodations before 5:00 PM. Killing time consisted mainly of eating at Italian restaurants, one of which was ran by an Indian guy who could speak English and Japanese. Talk about globalization! At another resturaunt, we looked around and realized that we were the only two people eating with chopsticks - how funny is that? We also went to a mega-huge department store called Keio. The store was more or less like a Macy’s, except Macy’s doesn’t sell custom made swords for thousands of dollars. We couldn’t quite afford the swords, but we did buy ourselves some real nice chopsticks there.

After shopping, we went back to the Park Hyatt to retrieve our luggage and started our decent from grace. Being too broke/cheap now to take a cab, we walked for miles underground to get to a subway station that would take us back to Akihabara. We were lucky enough to catch our car right at the most crowded time of day, and even luckier to get to ride it for the longest amount of time since we’ve been here. We were packed in like pigs in Spam.

We arrived in Akihabara sweaty and unhappy. I whipped out a crude map to find our hotel and led us in the wrong direction for a block before throwing a red flag. Diss set me straight and we were off in the right direction. Finally, we made it to our hotel, the Akihabara Capsule Inn. Luckily we didn’t blink or we would have passed it. Here is Diss standing victoriously in front of the Inn, probably thinking at this point that we should have booked the coffin hotel BEFORE the Hyatt, or maybe not at all.

Capsule or “coffin” hotels are super-economy hotels where each room, which is really just sleeping space, is only about 3’ wide, 3’ tall, and 6’ long. Inside there is a mattress, a pillow, a blanket, a TV, a radio, and some hot, stuffy air that never seems to get vented – all the comforts of home. To give you a little perspective, the rooms at the Capsule Inn were smaller than just the shower stall of our room at the Park Hyatt, and they were less expensive than the two drinks we had at the New York Bar. Oh how the mighty have fallen.

The protocol for checking into the place was a little convoluted to say the least. We just wanted to leave our bags and go back out into the city, but they made us take off our shoes and tried to tell us to put them in a shoe locker and give them the key. We kept our shoes and handed them keys to empty lockers. After some confused, high level talks we were given a piece of steel dental floss and a toy lock so that we could chain our luggage to either the stairs or a rolling-cart. We then had to give back the little toy key, which they attached to a bracelet that already had another key on it, and then took all of it back and handed us two laminated slips of paper with a number on them. We shrugged and left thousands of dollars of computer equipment and electronics behind, protected only by a thin piece of wire and a toy lock.

Out on the town, Diss decides on a whim that he wants new contact lenses. We stumbled into an optometry center. I was not very optimistic about the whole thing, but Diss was feeling oddly determined, so we went upstairs and Diss asked for contacts. The lady answered him in Japanese. He looked at me for help. I shrugged. The lady went away, and returned a moment later with a young Japanese girl who spoke very good American English, even throwing in the occasional “like” here and there. I waited in the lobby as they brought him in for a free examine. Yes, free. He emerged 15 minutes later with 3 months worth of contacts that only cost him $63.00.  On the way out, the girl apologized to him for taking so long. She even walked us out of the building. Why oh why couldn’t we have been staying at the Hyatt again?!?

High on his success, Diss and I go into a store called Love Merci to buy some, uh, souvenirs. I don’t think that I will ever get the sight of men in suits buying masturbators and dildos out of my mind. I’ll say no more. We then went to another place to buy Diss a new suitcase because the one he brought was literally on its last leg and kept falling over.

We put off going back to the kennel as long as we could, but it was getting late and we felt the time was right to face the music and go back to the Capsule Inn. We enter and immediately take off our shoes for fear of getting yelled at, put them in shoe lockers by the door, lock the lockers, remove the keys, and hand them to the front desk lady along with our slips of paper with a number on them. She gives us our wristband keys back.

We then go to the 2nd floor to lock our smaller bags into wafer-thin lockers, pausing only to wait for a bare-assed Asian man to get out of the way and streak passed us on the way to the shower. Diss and I change into the supplied robes (which were of the same material as over-starched hospital gowns) and decide that a group shower was not in our futures. Then it was up to the 6th floor to find our rooms. Here’s Dissident’s room:

Here is the inside of mine with the door (curtain) closed:

Here is the beautiful view from my room:

It’s said that everyone should try a night in a coffin hotel, but what they fail to mention is that if you have been to jail before you may suffer from flashbacks. They took my shoes, my clothes, and my stuff. They put me in a scratchy robe, gave me a toothbrush and a towel, and confined me to a 3x3x6 cell. The dull yellow lights outside the cell never go out all night. The showers are communal. You hear several people snore all night, as well as other interesting sounds. Also, for some reason, the pillows were “stuffed” with hollow plastic tubes.

Just the same, I’m being too harsh on the place because we had just come from such a drastically different experience the night before. The people of the Capsule Inn were very patient with our bumbling ignorance and lack of communication. Everything was very clean, no one bothered us, and the sleeping capsules were actually kind of roomy if not a little short in length. Even the weird pillows somehow felt nice. When we checked out the next day, the older guy who seemed to run the place was even nice enough to take Diss’s old suitcase to dispose of even though, because of the bulk, he would have to pay to dispose of it. For a cheap place to stay for the night, I’d give it two thumbs up.


TV


Radio, Clock, TV and Lighting Controls


Not a real window - thank god.


Floor plan, 28 capsules (two high)

Video to follow.