18:00

I’m at the Incheon International Airport in South Korea. I don’t remember feeling as relaxed in an airport before. Shops mixed with gates on the ground floor while cafés and rest areas are located on the first floor. There is plenty of sunlight, free wifi, and people moving around in an organised chaos.

2:00

I’m staying in the district of Nakano, not the most glamorous of Tokyo, west of red light district Shinjuku. Toshi and I communicated via WhatsApp to plan my arrival at his guest house I found through Airbnb. I arrive at midnight. There are 8 rooms in total in this house, 4 of which are available for rent. All residents share a single bathroom, two toilets (for male and female), a large kitchen, 10 garbage bins (for meticulous recyclable materials separation), an attic and a rooftop.

Toshi said he has lived in Tokyo for 10 years and maybe knows less than 10% of it. He took my late check-in penalty of ¥2000 and walked me to the nearest Family Mart. I was famished.

It is a privilege and a luxury to have a convenience store like Family Mart open 24/7, I ordered a box of Katsu Curry for ¥460, the clerk heated it up in the store microwave and 4 minutes after arriving home I had finished it.

This is a photo of my room in the Nakano-Shimbashi Share House. My initial idea was to take a photo from the rooftop but I found a cockroach lurking on the way up and decided it was probably time to go to sleep.