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Published: August 8th 2017
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After an early night last night we were both awake and refreshed and ready to go at half past midnight last night. Not helpful. Stephen got back to sleep reasonably quickly, but I was awake for another two hours after that. Then we both slept till after 7 this morning. It was a cool, cloudy morning,but the rain had finished. One thing that's really weird is how quiet it is here. There are very few people around, nor even many cars, at so-called rush-hours: 5-6ish last night, and 8ish this morning. There are thousands of families - surely tens of thousands when you think of the 360-degree cityscape - in dozens of apartment blocks around here, and yet at any one time, there are maybe 4 cars on the road, and perhaps 2 or 3 people walking. And we have a park visible across the road! Just one or two walking their dogs, a few kids going to school, but incredibly few people. The noisiest things around are the cicadas and crows.
Anyway, we left before 9 this morning to head to the next station along, because Giang (the apartment owner, pron = "Yang") had told us that
that was a good place to get electronics. Since he has no TV, and we couldn't see how we would get along without one, we offered to buy him one. He laughed, but went along with it in the end. But when we got to that station, we headed out in one direction and couldn't see anything that looked useful, so we went back the other way and there was still nothing that looked like a TV shop. There was a 100-yen shop (equal to a $1-shop, but with better stuff) and we got a few things for us and for the apartment, like cutlery (Giang has nothing but chopsticks, plastic spoons and a fruit knife), and then I remembered that I had seen a familiar electronics retailer when I had looked at Chiba city itself on Google Maps. So we headed back to the station.
At Chiba we found the shop we wanted and were served by some very helpful staff. But after some discussion, we found that a) the wifi problems at the apartment might have been a question of timing, b) having a TV entails a $40-50 dollar NHK TV bill every month, and
c) they didn't have in stock either of the two tripods that Stephen would have like to buy. So that was that. We did get a couple of small gadgets though.
We had lunch then at a little noodle shop nearby. In the classic Japanese style, it had the plastic display dishes in a window, but it also had an array of buttons, similar to a vending machine, where you pressed the button for the dish you wanted, paid your money, got your change and a ticket, then went in and took a seat. The meals were cooked by humans, however, providing normal (ie, very good) udon noodles and rice dishes.
Our next stop was a department store. Our bath towels, lovely big, thick ones that we treated ourselves to in Australia with David Jones gift cards (thanks, Valerie) are still lovely and thick, but they have some holes in. The biggest Vietnamese ones are not particularly big or thick, so we had already decided to get some more over here. And then we found that Giang doesn't have much in the way of towels either, so it was worth getting some early on
in the trip. We found the right department, and they had towels on special - yay! - and they were incredibly thick and amazingly, luxuriously soft and light. So that was easy. Coming home, we travelled on a monorail for a couple of stops. That was cool, although almost the same as travelling on a train when you're in it. It was only seeing another one go past, hanging in the air, that you realised you were on a cool means of transport.
Home again, and trying the wifi at this time of day has yielded positive results. I was able to contact Giang, (because now we had wifi!) and I asked if he was able to use the Internet at night, and he said that was the only time he used it, and he never had any problems. So, um, I don't know. What we need to do, tho, is remember to take the little portable wifi machine out with us. That's how it works, here, apparently. Each location's "free wifi" is clunky and hassleful to log in to, so you use your own private portable router. This means that we don't need a Japanese SIM
card (which we would normally have bought on arrival) but instead we can use our VNese phone number and be contacted via apps like Viber or Line. But that's why the lack of wifi could have been such a problem - we were out of contact with anyone who we could have asked for help!
The only problem now is getting my photos off the phone and into the laptop to upload for this blog, and for backup. Stephen's asleep at the moment, and I wouldn't mind being so soon, too, so maybe that issue will be solved later. Dinner tonight will probably be down near the station again (this place is very residential - no eateries around the neighbourhood at all that we have seen so far) but we'll need to wait for our feet to recover a little before heading out again this evening.
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