To Japan!

This morning, to our luck, we woke up again. I mean, it would be quite sad if we didn’t.
Anyway, after waking up and sleeping in again, we woke up once more. This time we would get ready for quite a slow pacing day. We only had one item on our list, this was to get Marcel the achievement to get his crane to the park in Hiroshima. So this was what we headed out to do. We did not have breakfast yet, so we stopped on our way to the park at a lunch house. This is best compared with the canteen you may be used to. The only difference here is that they had a special menu containing some bread, coffee and a little snack. Of course we only got note of this after we got our breakfast excluding the coffee.
At least it gave us an explanation of why they asked us if we wanted to have a drink with it so often. When our bellies were full of stuffed bread, we moved on to the park.

This was not too far away and we took a little detour through the arcade hall, in which we discovered a new arcade machine. It was quite the hilarious machine with buttons for 3 players, each player only needed 4 buttons and the games were easy to understand. I probably need to explain the game consisted of a lot of mini-games that were randomly chosen and the difficulty would increase after completing a few games successfully. The first time we played Marcel got the hang of it and got to stage 8 or so. Sybren, however, was already down after stage 2.

We knew we had to move on to the park now and so we did. It was a short trip, as I already stated. We delivered the crane, took a picture and headed back to our hotel room. Back there we took a little rest, somehow we were quite tired, not by this small trip in particular. For Sybren it probably had to do with the cold he caught. As you all know this is quite nasty at times. After taking a little rest and watching some television. – Japanese commercials involve a lot of dancing by the way – We got some noodles for lunch.

Shortly after having finished the noodles we decided it would be a good time to get some clean clothes. So we figured we should wash some. Luckily the hotel provided us with washing machines and tumble dryers.
We went to the floor where the washing machines were set up. Of course we had our filthy clothes with us and a small vending machine next to it sold us the needed washing powder.
“How does this work?” we  both thought. To our luck, the always friendly Japanese people of the hotel made a translation for us.

A little side track. We are currently learning the French language via the television!

Back to the story. We started decrypting the written English (there will be a picture online soon covering this). What we got out of it was we had to put in money and hold the one button (as much as an iphone has!) on the machine for 30 seconds and after 10 seconds it would start cleaning itself to prepare to clean our clothes. So we did this exactly and seems like were doing something right. After 30 seconds passed we put in our clothes and it started washing. We got to our room and killed some time with playing games, watching some Japanese shows and talking about what to do next. We figured we would go back to the arcade hall after having tumble-dried our cloths.

The alarm ringed and we got back to the washing machine to pick up our cloths and put them in the dryer. This was quite an easy task. All we had to do was put in our wet cloths and throw some coins in it. It started without warning and said it would take 30 minutes. So we killed some more time. When the 30 minutes were over, Marcel got back there and discovered the clothes were not dry yet. So another coin went in and we waited another 30 minutes. Yes, this was quite a tiring task; washing and drying our clothes.

We got our clothes and were totally satisfied with the result. Clean and soft clothes! All this waiting got us quite hungry (it was about 18.30 at this time) and we got out to get some food. Sybren decided he wanted to try the Beef Doria, Marcel told him about the day before and so we went to the “Italian Tomato” and ordered our food. After having finished this and having agreed Beef Doria is quite nice food to fill your stomach with, we went on to the arcade hall. This time we came prepared and had about 500 Yen in coins of 100 Yen each. Each continue we used one of these coins. And after having finished all those coins only Marcel was still standing and he got to the last stage and nailed it.
Before heading back we stopped by a local supermarket, also referred to as a Seven-Eleven or 7-11, to get some snacks. Marcel bought himself a beer, which Sybren already did when he got the noodles, he needed smaller coins and there was no exchange machine nearby. So he thought he would just buy a sprite like drink, only to discover it contained 6% alcohol. (Kirin Chu-hi was the name of the drink, if you find your self interested) Back home we watched some more Japanese shows (really weird, as always). During this we drank our beer. Sybren’s beer was no beer, but some lemon juice with alcohol and Marcel’s tasted like Whiskey, so he deciphered the code on his can and apparently it said: “Whiskey with Soda”; so that got explained. After finishing our beer and snacks, we typed the blog-post and went to sleep.

As a last note, I get comments telling me the big wall of text hits for 9999 and they can not sustain that much damage.So I figured to put a little Too Long; Did’nt Read note at the end.

TL;DR

Got up, went to park, washed some cloths, ate and got to sleep.

Thank you again for reading.