West Shinjuku

We ended up getting up around 6 or 7am yesterday, which would normally be an hour I could never imagine waking up at anymore. After showering, we walked over to the popular donut chain called Mister Donut. Luckily it's about a 5-10 or so minute walk just straight across from our apartment. I got a "strawberry ring" donut, which was a donut covered with strawberry icing. Maybe it's because we had gotten there just as the store opened, but the donut tasted so good. So fluffy and soft, not to mention the strawberry part tasted like real strawberries. I also had melon soda, which was pretty good I must say. She even brought over water for Daniel even though he didn't order anything, which impressed us.

I ended up getting my first point card from Mister Donut, which helped me learn how to ask for one. I chose the regular one which is good for a year and every 100 points I get 100 yen off of a donut, though I kinda wish I had chosen the premium one so I could save up 150 points and get a Mister Donut phone strap. They look really cute. Otherwise though, you get 3 points for every 100 yen you spend, and donuts are about 105 yen or so as it is, so if I go often enough I'll get a practically free donut, which isn't so bad at all.

We had started making a list of all of the things we need the previous day, such as a fan, and decided to head back to West Shinjuku since we saw a huge department store right near the station. Though we had a bit of confusion on how to get exactly to the west Shinjuku station, so we ended up somewhere more east I think. We decided our first stop would be a store called Odakyu.

However, Odakyu didn't open until 10am, and it was 9am. So, we headed to the local McDonalds. We didn't buy anything at this point though.

I took this picture while we were waiting. I was hoping I could get a better picture of the outside, but the interior is neat too.

When it was opening time for the store, we headed over and went in. The inside was totally not what we were expecting. There were over 10 floors, and each of them offered different sorts of items.

We found this Eva model, which was pretty neat. It's actually made out of paper.

We ended up buying some necessities like a router and LAN cable for our apartment. Unfortunately, we didn't find any towels, which we really need to find today since I forgot to pack some. Right now we only have 1! However, we also bought a fan, which is so nice. It even has a remote control and a timer. We spent quite a lot of time looking at the shiny stuff. It was so busy in there and there was just so many cute things, it was kinda overwhelming. There was even a Beyblade tournament going on in the toy section! There was a really long line of kids waiting to participate too.

I managed to snag my second point card from there though, the Bic Card. :D We also got this ridiculous looking fan from au (which is one of the 3 major cell phone companies in Japan):

Afterwards we went back to McDonalds. I got chicken selects and small french fries. They were pretty similar to food back in America, but the french fries were slightly less saltier I think. Still the same taste though. Daniel had a teriyaki burger, which was something else. I only had a bite though. Unfortunately there's no Diet Coke to be found though, so I ended up getting a Coke Zero.

After McDonalds we headed back to West Shinjuku Station and tried to figure out what we did wrong in the first place. We've been taking the subway and seems we missed the stop we had needed to get off at for the west exit. We did it right this time, but we also managed to snag ourselves a commuter pass called Pasmo. Now we don't need anymore cash to get around to places by train, yay! It also works as a kind of credit card at a lot of convenience stores too. It's true when they say that Japan uses cash mainly.

We got home, set our new toys up, and got onto the internet for the first time. Yay for success!

I also managed to take a few pictures from the outside view of our apartment:

Mind you, these are from outside in front of our apartment. Like I (think I) mentioned in the previous post, our view from our balcony is another apartment.

After chilling for a while, Daniel realized he needed to find a converter for his laptop, so we set out for the same store I mentioned before that had a bike inside. The bike wasn't inside, so we went inside. Luckily they had the converter so we bought that. We headed down further from the station and found a 100 yen shop called Lawson 100 and bought a bunch of things we needed, such as hangers.

Throughout the day, I had been wondering why so many people were wearing pants or leggings, and it was at this point that I found out: mosquitoes. I didn't even feel myself getting bit or anything. The only thing I noticed was that my legs were itchy. I ended up getting bitten at least twice on each leg, and they're pretty itchy!! Unfortunately our apartment doesn't allow incense or candles or any type, so we can't buy mosquito repellent incense. But luckily even though we've kept the bathroom window open we haven't seen any bugs. In fact, the amount of bugs I've seen is two. One was this lovely big yellow butterfly that was fluttering around in front of the train station, the other was what we think was a mosquito that was laying dead in our room. However, we hear the singing of the cicadas everywhere, which provides such a background music that makes you truly realize you're in Japan.

However, at this point we're still missing important things like trash bags, a mirror (there's no mirrors at all in our apartment!), or the most important thing: towels. I ended up asking a Japanese friend on Ameba (a popular blogging service in Japan; I have a Japanese blog there) where we might find some. She gave me the name of a place where we should be able to find them, so we'll be heading to Shibuya today.

When I got home, I was exhausted and done for the day. I turned on the a/c, caught up on the interwebz, and eventually started drifted between sleep and being awake. I probably went to bed around 10 or so? But I ended up waking up around 3am and I've been up since. I still feel a bit tired, but I'm actually pretty hungry and about ready to start the day.