浅草 Asakusa

The place we're staying, Sakura Hostel, is filled with mostly foreign students for some reason I don't understand. Foreigners stay here because it's cheap compared to other places one could stay in Tokyo. It's so popular with foreigners that it was even featured on a morning news show. Mako, John, Jordan, and Callie were even interviewed for it. The show is all in Japanese, but even if you don't understand it, it's still pretty cool to see us on TV:

Sakura Hostel isn't that cheap (e.g., approximately US$40 per night), but for Tokyo, it's considered near rock-bottom. What I don't get is that Japanese students aren't rich either, so why don't more of them stay here? It would make it more interesting for the foreigners and it would be a great place to practice English, which actually one group of Japanese guests did do.

Here's the main floor. That's the front desk in the back, a kitchen for guests on the right, and 6 computers with Internet on the left. Guests can bring food and eat it on the tables in the middle. Mako and I use a group of tables for our classroom.

Here I am teaching the class on manga and anime.

As you might expect for a place that's called a "hostel," Sakura Hostel is rather spartan, meaning small rooms with bunk beds and communal showers and toilets down the hall.

Here's a room with six bunk beds. We reserved this for the girls because there were six of them. We got a room with four bunk beds for the guys' because there were four of them.

And here's the double room for Mako and me. Pretty much just four walls, two beds, and that amount of floor space between the beds.

This was the view from our room. I should have taken this on a clear day, but during the rainy season, there are far more cloudy days than clear ones. See that pagoda on the right? That's the same as...

...this pagoda on the left. I was walking through here by myself and realized it wasn't cloudy, and also realized I had my camera in my pocket, so I snapped this shot. We're in the Asakusa area of Tokyo here, and this is Senso-ji, the big Buddhist temple with the iconic Kaminari-mon, or Thunder Gate.

Here's Kaminari-mon in the evening, with a passing group of junior high school students on a school trip to Tokyo.

Through the gate is this long row of shops. This car-free street is called Nakamise. That's Kaminari-mon there at the end.

And if you turn the other way, you see this inner gate (that's our students there in the middle) with the actual temple there in the back. All the back streets around here are mini-adventures into every kind of imaginable store, noodle shop, sushi joint, bathhouse, little shrine that pops out of nowhere, and a little amusement park (which you can see from Mako's and my room above). We're getting pretty used to all this enchantment because we have to walk through it to get to a subway station to go anywhere else in Tokyo. Like ordinary Japanese folks, we end up walking a lot, to get to the bank or the post office or the grocery store or places to eat or the subway. And the subway is how we get to anywhere else. I myself much prefer this kind of workout a gym because we're putting exercise to a practical use, i.e., getting somewhere, as opposed to a piece of gym equipment—the ultimate reduction wheel in my mind.