Another rude awakening in Yokohama with the P.A. system. This was only the half of it. I didn’t get much sleep the night before, as some guy in the room was snoring like a chainsaw all night. I tried stuffing tissue in my ears (didn’t work), clamping my head between two pillows (didn’t work), and eventually just pounded the concrete wall with my fist. Eventually he stopped – to be replaced by someone with a nasty cough. I was really ready to kill at this point. If I had’ve had a gun at the time, I’d probably be writing this letter from prison…

This is the one of the only drawbacks to hostelling. I had the same sort of thing happen in the Gifu hostel one night, and I had hoped that would’ve been the last time, however I was not quite so fortunate. Yokohama Youth Hostel takes the cake for being the loudest in the morning (and the night!)

Left the hostel at 9:30 to go and purchase my MiniDisc recorder. Of course, in Japan, most stores open at 10am, however the store you really want to go to will open at 11am, so I had to kill some time. Roamed around the city, and eventually went to a hotel, and used their long-distance card-phone to call Jamie and Christina (friends of mine who work at the same location I do), then to give Neall a call and see what was new in PG (and to confirm that the house hadn’t burnt down or something). I had to grab some more money for the MD recorder, so I went to the same cash machine, and found it out of order (great…), however the Mastercard machine nearby worked, and I grabbed some money there. All told, I was carrying around about 80,000 yen at the time (around $1,100 Cdn).

Bought the MD recorder, then jumped on the train for Akihabara, where I stored my backpack in a locker, then quickly went out and grabbed my Macross Plus, and City Hunter LDs. Found a nice Aiwa Walkman for 8,000 yen, so I bought it. On the way back to the station, I found a Captain Tylor LD for 1,400 yen, so I bought that as well. Laserdiscs are REALLY cheap here, and I could easily spent a few hundred dollars just on LDs quite easily. I checked into a real hotel tonight (the “Shin Nakano Lodge” – cheap, and clean). Got cleaned up, played with my new toys, and watched Robocop 3 on TV (it’s bad in any language).