It's finally Sunday and my workshop is over. During the past week I was eating out every day, sleeping without blanket, washing my hands with shampoo and couldn't do any laundry since I had literally no time to look for a good laundry liquid in a tiny convenience store near the station when coming home late. Apart from "new", "tasty", "wonderful" and other doubtfully advertising adjectives, there are no useful English titles on any of the products displayed in the local shops. No, photo translate doesn't help either, as you can see from the screenshot below where I fail to understand what I hold in my hand. It certainly is something more complex than just "lots of brown sugar" suggested in Russian.
So this morning I braced myself and went grocery shopping in a big chain supermarket. I was very lucky that my dormitory neighbors gave me several useful advices and explained the bare minimum of what to buy, so I knew what to look for. The hardest thing, I guess, was choosing from 20 different brands of rice and soy sauce.
Thanks to one of my Japanese-speaking subscribers, I could find the laundry liquid without killing too much time, that's a huge achievement!
Some of you inquired about how my dorm looks like, so here you go: the common kitchen on my floor and a small bonus - my first homemade lunch - udon with soy sprouts, cabbage, dried seaweed, sesame sauce and crab meat, which is amazingly cheap here. It turned out too salty since I had no concept of how intense the soy sauce is in Japan compared to Europe.
Now that I'm settled and have some food in my fridge, I am about to go sightseeing in much praised Aoyama area. I'll tell you about the promised penguin and the murder after I finish, don't worry!

Long time no see! You know I always come up with stupid excuses for not writing earlier, but this time it was kind of a big deal. For over a week I was extremely busy surviving my first heartbreak since middle school! Moreover, it apparently triggered an unexpected "Western expat crisis" which is reported to happen after you settle into your routine here, when the initial fascination with the country grows into a gradual disappointment with its negative sides. To deal with it I got myself so busy with studying and attending events that I barely had time to think about why I'm even here and where I'm heading to in general. Well, heartbreaks are sometimes very effective in changing your life for the better - after the one in middle school I firmly decided to study abroad (kinda went too far though), and this time I started practicing traditional samurai swordfight and found two crazy part-time jobs. Anyways, I finally wrote all about the most surprising aspect of Japan for me - its totally controlled public environment. In my next text I hope I’ll be able to show how this influences local architecture and especially housing. ✿ http://telegra.ph/Penguin-Stolen-from-Ueno-Zoo-04-23

I know it's quite a random story but I just came back after an exhausting day in Tokyo to my dorm where I found almost all residents drinking with our elderly dormitory head Nakajima-san who brought his homemade miso soup and other snacks to share in the living room. My floor neighbor - Korean oil painting professor - brought down some beers and Russian "voduka". Needless to say they don't understand a word in English but still make sure that no one is neither hungry nor sober tonight. God bless Japan!

Just finished sorting out photos I took on my daytrip to Hakone and Odawara in Kanagawa prefecture. Odawara Art Foundation with its scenographic pavilions was definitely the best part of it.