Tokyo, Australia

When we arrived in Sydney, we were exhausted, I had been coughing for 24 hours straight and we'd just spent the "night" (about 3 and a half hours) in the hostel room with the creepy German. That mindset might explain why we ended up moving into a place called Tokyo Village hostel when we didn't immediately find vacancy anywhere else. Our exhaustion from covering the entire country of New Zealand in 8 days might explain why we somehow ended up staying in Tokyo Village for 5 nights. But I'm not sure, because I don't know that there is really any explanation for why we stayed. This morning though, when one of the owners knocked on our door around 10 a.m. to see if we were staying another night, we all kind of looked around at each other, couldn't see any reason why we should stay another night, so we packed our bags and left. Probably the best decision we've made since our arrival in Sydney.

Tokyo Village is really impossible to explain. I actually told Laura last night that I wanted to go around with a hidden camera and catch images of it so that people could kind of understand. But I'm not sure even that would do it.

Basically, it is a commune. It's run by Asians and while when we told people where we were staying, they assumed we were the only people there who weren't Asian, that is actually incorrect. There were a lot of very odd people there, nationalities totally unknown.

All over the hostel (including the sign outside it) were pictures of a little dog, supposedly named Totoro. We never saw him. I don't believe he existed. They kept promising he'd show up the next day. I'm pretty suspicious.

Our room smelled like fertilizer. I mean, seriously, like just a big bag of grass fertilizer. Until the third day when Everett bought Coco Butter lotion and smeared it all over himself making the room smell very bad. I will not go into detail on the scents gained from mixing fertilizer and coco butter. Our room was also about 16 inches from a 6 lane road that had 18-wheeler trucks and massive buses going down it all hours of the night. And we were on an intersection with a walk sign that beeped like a video game everytime the light switched. Of course, we couldn't close the window due to the stench.

Every night around 5 or 6, tons of random people would congregate in the "courtyard" (a small brick space surrounded by barbed wire) behind the hostel. There was like an endless supply of rice in the kitchen and we were told we could help ourselves. So everyone sat out back, eating rice and listening to '70s music and smoking alot in really dim light. All wearing big baggy pants, long hair and bright colors. And staring at us as we walked by, looking really out of place. Seriously, a commune.

The best part though was the shower situation. The first day we got there, they indicated that there was an all girls shower adjacent to the courtyard, but up in the dorms where we were, there were just toilets and one shower. So, Laura went down to check out the showers and returned, telling me that the girls one looked good. When I went down carrying my shower stuff along, we walked in together and I immediately noted that the shower stalls were all see through. Laura "claims" she didn't notice this. So, for the last five days, Laura and I have showered with our towels thrown over the stall between us. Until last night when our towels were in the wash and we showered with nothing there. It's worth noting that until about a month ago Laura and I were just a few cubicles apart at work. Things, like modesty, change quickly when you're staying at Tokyo Village though.

Tokyo Village was also about 18 miles outside of town. At least, that's how it felt every time we tried to go somewhere. And one night I made the mistake of walking home on my own and thought that probably my chances of getting raped and pillaged on my way, or at the very least mugged, were about 90%.

So, although we'd resigned ourselves to staying there for the duration of our time in Sydney, when they knocked on our door this morning, there just didn't seem to be a point anymore. So, we walked down the block, caught a train to Bondi Beach (our favorite of the Sydney beaches) and now we're happily settled in a room with a view of the ocean that smells pleasantly like sunscreen.

I couldn't be happier.