Roppongi

I agreed to this well before I should have. The plan was to go out yet again tonight... only that by 11pm I was struggling to keep my eyes open and the club we wanted to get into looked pretty quiet.

This left us in the middle of Roppongi (Tokyo) with no place to stay... We walked to Akasaka (I'm pretty sure that's the name of the area) looking for a capsule hotel listed in our book that would accept women... we couldn't find it - we did however find one that accepted only men... so here we are in an internet cafe, spending 6 hours sleeping at computers. I have to say, so far, my little station is pretty darn cozy. I even got a blanket out of it!

I'm still sick. It seems like going out last weekend made me more sick (probably walking in the rain at 3am with the shoes I had on didn't help) and I really don't think that going out or staying up late is exactly helping the situation. At this point all that's left of my cold is a bad cough that of course only seems to affect me in the middle of the night when I'm asleep.

In an attempt to get rid of the cold I bought a toque in Takayama (which has been quite good at hiding my horrible hair which has now turned into a full lion's mane). The hat is absolutely massive and honestly, I really just bought it because the woman selling it seemed to really want to make a sale. We were in the morning market which was actually quite good (it could have used a little more bustling but it was pretty good.) As I tried on the hat, I watched this woman who must've been in her mid-eighties smile and nod at me in approval. I think she made the hat... it looks hand-made by someone old. I'm going to go with that - she made the hat. Apparently after I bought the hat, the old woman brought the money I gave her to what Ryan thinks must've been her husband who apparently (this is really Ryan's story) made a face like "whatcha got there?" followed by an expression of "good work!"

Alrighty... the longer I stay up, the less sleep I'm getting... sleep time.