We apologize for the suspense.  We’ve spent the past week consumed with wrapping up our time in Tokyo, preparing for Season 3, being homeless, and finalizing some visual firecrackers – as Jed said before, the wait will be worth it.  So the blog has been left somewhat derelict during this period, but we promise that it will come back alive soon.  My little adventure of being a refugee is still unfolding, but I have had so little time to aggregate and organize all the information.  That too should come this week. 

Expect awesome stuff soon…

I have tried to maintain a strictly healthy diet during this adventure, avoiding fast food and concentrated sugar – foods that make me tired and easily frustrated. The only way I’ve survived off the number of hours I’m sleeping is because of my diet, which is admittedly not appetizing but nonetheless, highly functional. Here’s my favorite…

One of my 3 basic food groups...

Mochi balls (rice beaten, mashed, made into a sticky dough, and steamed) dipped in a mix of kinako (a common powder high in protein) and fiber. Mochi gives calories, kinako gives protein, and fiber gives, well, fiber. It’s only about 120 Yen and it only involves me carrying around the powder mix. Simple, easy, effective.

Just before 1am, on the west side of Shinjuku, I was worried that my bed for the night would be somewhere in the belly of the subway station.

My situation was a little ridiculous – I had to navigate around Shinjuku station, home to a score of homeless people, to reach the red light district so I could sleep in an internet cafe for 5 or 6 hours.  The passage connecting the East and West of the station had closed, so I needed to find my way out and then find my way around the station…in the cold…after midnight…to a neighborhood famous for hostess clubs.  In the course of this adventure, I came across a man defecating at the bus station, an entire station section filled with sleeping homeless people, and a small herd of businessmen who had missed the last train.  It wasn’t quite the way I wanted to spend my evening, but I still didn’t share the fate of those sleeping in the station.  As challenging as being a net cafe refugee has been, there are far worse ways to sleep in Tokyo…

All our bills are gone. The 500, 100 and 50-yen coins are gone. And yesterday, I scrounged out the last of our 10-yen coins– about 80 of them– as a gas leak in the kitchen of our run-down guesthouse quickly spread through the building. It seemed that at any minute, a spark and then fireball could have rushed through our rooms and destroyed every last one of our possessions, from film equipment, to laptops and passports. So we did what any rational person would do, and spent all our remaining coins on the 99¥ menu, waiting in the snow for an explosion that, luckily, never came.

Later that evening, I foolishly took a late train to Meiji-jingumae station, spending 320¥ out of my whole world of 410¥, without enough for a return ticket. When the last train left for home, I found myself still out somewhere near Shinjuku, with snow still falling, very far from our subway line in Shibuya. I was disoriented and totally broke. So I just walked, scanning the horizon where I could for familiar shapes, and eventually found my way to Shibuya in a process that took around 3 hours. I had to deliberately overdraw my checking account to afford the train ticket home.

And so here I am: back home and tired. Out of coins; $20 in the hole.

Right now rob is counting change as fast as he can. Hes doing that because we have no money, we haven’t eaten yet today, there is a gas leak in our guest house, and now we have to find somewhere warm to go until the house burns down or the leak is repaired.

Also, it is snowing.

Man, what a fucking day.

ManBoo! Cafe, on the edge of Kabukicho (the red-light district near Shinjuku), has so far emerged as my favorite place between the hours of 11pm and 6am.  980Y/7 straight hours in you enter between 9pm and 3am.  That price is unbeatable…unfortunately, it buys you a dimly lit booth in a long line of computer stations.

Dark lights, sticky keyboards.

CONS
* The dude to my right smoked all night = first-class second-hand smoke
* No footrests = no lying down completely
* Constant commotion = no silence
* Crowded aisles = frequent bumping

PROS
* Cappuccino machine = (come on, that’s obvious)
* Slurpee machines = sugar fix
* Miso soup machine (!) = free warm salty calories
* Showers, though I haven’t used them yet

Drink machines!

Sorry to have to be so cryptic, but there won’t be an episode this week. Instead, you’ll be seeing something totally new. It’s not quite ready yet, but just sit tight. I promise it’s worth the wait.

If you’ve ever been traveling with others, you know that there’s a strong feedback between how they’re feeling about something and how you feel about it. The idea is a lot like waves in a pool of good morale– if many waves come together at their peaks, things are amazing, and we feel absolutely vindicated in leaving our lives behind. The problem is that Brian, Matt and I meet at our troughs as well.

Episode 3 begins to explore just how we felt every day living in poverty. We could tell ourselves each day, “yeah, I’m poor, but I’m poor in Japan!” but saying it didn’t take away the mental and physical exhaustion. It didn’t inspire us to put in another all-nighter, and it didn’t give Christmas back to those that missed their families.

Maybe that sounds like a lot of privileged whining. I’m ok saying that, because the depression we felt around being poor wouldn’t have been so strong if we hadn’t had nice lives to look back on. Matts, Brians, and Robs in alternate dimensions, were laughing with their cousins, ordering a pizza, or playing with their cat. They were happy and healthy, and best of all, not hungry all the time. While so many would envy our lives abroad, keep in mind just how tremendous these comforts really are, and also just how much it sucks to live a monotonous life of white rice and eggs.