Finding another hotel in Tokyo, Part 2

So far, I’ve been sinfully lucky with my stays in Tokyo (knock on wood).

1. The first time was BN (before Narita), in an overnight stopover. The JAL flight booked me a room free-of-charge at JAL Hotel Nikko off Haneda Airport. I went up to the counter and was greeted by a smiling man holding my passport. It had apparently slipped off in the shuttle from the airport and been safely, quickly delivered back to me.

It was a surprisingly peaceful hotel and I still remember my first look outside my room window. It was of a small wooded area. It was autumn and the slightest of rains was falling, softening the outlines of wet, green trees. The view had the quality of watercolors.

2. The second time was a student hostel in Kichijoji. I was coming home from a year spent in Germany. My girlfriend who was studying in nearby International Christian University made all the arrangements and booked a ryokan-style room, a fairly large space clean of everything except a large closet for luggage and tatami mats that we would use to cover the whole floor area at night. It is difficult both to describe and forget the nights spent rolling around all that space, effectively removed from the real world by paper screens (shoji).

3. The third time is described earlier in this blog, making a late decision to attend a printing convention and finding room in  a clean, efficient hotel just a stroll away from the convention site.

4. The fourth time is the topic of this blog entry.

After taking a short ride with a jolly cabby eager to practice his English, I found myself in front of Tokyu Stay Shibuya Shin-minamiguchi. The reception counter had a middle-aged gentleman who quickly found my reservation file. As I said earlier, I booked my room by e-mailing the hotel directly. All correspondence was in English, even the advice to take the airport bus and a cab, rather than getting lost in the labyrinths and stairways of Shibuya station.

I was asked to pay for my stay in advance and after 5 minutes, found myself in an L-shaped room. The door opened to the kitchenette that was, like the rest of the L-shaped room, immaculate. Smoking was allowed but the room smelled neither of smoke nor of cooking oil. I checked out the bathroom. The white shower curtain was meticulously folded into pleats set on the lip of the tub. I found this detail so exquisite that I delayed taking my shower, going out to the small balcony instead, then lighting up a cigarette and cracking open a can of Sapporo Dry I had bought in the airport. In the distance, between buildings, one of the many trains that service Shibuya Station was coming in. Later in my stay, from the balcony, I was to make a time-lapse video of such a train leaving the statiion with its brood of office workers at the end of a workday. The balcony, small as it was, would serve as my beer-and-smoke place, allowing me to keep my living area clean and view the small sidestreet whose quiet, solitary walkers hid the fact that just a short corner away was the busy, buzzing intersection of Shibuya.