Capsule Hotel Sneaky Beers and Miscommunications
In a Capsule Hotel near Mount Fuji, a bunch of strangers started with the usual “Hi I’m …. Where are you from?” greetings that are so common to dorm room interactions. It was about 100 degrees in the room (okay little exaggeration) and there was an unsuccessful attempt on my part at getting the boss-man to turn down the heat a little, which actually resulted in all of us freezing our bits off (FYI – two more later attempts made it worse not better).
After some pronunciation issues with our names, we moved onto learning random words in all of our languages: Vietnamese, Japanese, Indonesian, Australia (yes that’s a different language), Canadian (yes that’s different too), French, Chinese, and American (need I say it again?). I’m pretty sure we picked the hardest words. And most of the attempts were met with “Noooooo”. Soon we were laughing at each other’s inability to pronounce basically anything.
Before long, we were all sitting around on the floor, or hanging out of our capsules, trying to hide snacks and beer from the boss-man, and feeling like old friends. At some stage during the evening, a whole lot of lollipops from Tokyo’s Penis Festival appeared and we were given a history lesson into the reasons for the festival… also very comical but none of which I can remember.
Even after we eventually went to our own capsules and quietened down, the conversations continued over a Facebook group chat, and every now and then you could hear a little giggle from one of the capsules.
This night quickly became one of the funniest evenings in a dorm room I’ve ever had. I love that these little moments of travel come up so unexpectedly and become wedged in our memory of a place. Dorm rooms really are the best fun.