The bulk of this day was spent on checking out from my Osaka lodging, taking a slow, nearly 3-hour bullet train back to Tokyo, and then checking in to my new place. My next two days will be fairly busy with lots of walking, and today was a luggage-moving day which can always be a bit taxing, so I wanted to largely take it easy today.

I checked out without incident around 10:00 am, which was as late as I could stay at the place before I would be charged an extra day, and then ambled over to Shin-Osaka station to wait for my bullet train at 12:03 pm. Surprise surprise, there was no rain today.

I saw one of the stores selling character goods for this character at Shin-Osaka Station, and this was a character that I’d also seen several times before on my trip while walking around, and I had even asked Miyu about it on Tuesday when we were strolling around regular Osaka Station. Miyu explained that the character’s name was Opanchu Usagi, and that it was from some social media video or something that had gone viral some time ago and become very popular in Japan. I thought it was a really ugly character design though:

I had a couple snacks I wanted to try out after reading about them in Soranews24, a tourist-facing English newspaper about Japan. The first was this roasted tea donut from Mister Donut (local), and so I bought one of them when I passed the Mister Donut store at Shin-Osaka Station.

It was a bit softer than I expected and also more sugary than I liked, but otherwise was doughnut… ty, with a vague green tea sort of scene to it. Cool. The second item is a bit further down the page.

As is my tradition, I also bought an ekiben, or train bento, to eat while on the bullet train. This time it was an Uzumasa Bento from Delica Station, and while I didn’t take a picture of the outside of the box, the inside looked like this:

Despite people saying that the shinkansen were very busy during Golden Week, the trains that I took both ways between Tokyo and Osaka were not crowded at all — or rather, the regular reserved carriage that I was in was sparsely occupied, maybe only 20% full at any given time at all. I have never sat in either the non-reserved carriages or the premium Green Car (first-class) carriages though, so I don’t know if either of those ones were fuller than normal. Or maybe it was because I was in an “S Work Seat” carriage which was meant for people who wanted to work (defined as people who wanted to use powered mobile devices — no one really was actually “working” at all). Those seats cost the same as a regular reserved carriage seat though, and the train stations at Tokyo and Shin-Osaka were no more busy than normal that I noticed either, so I didn’t get to experience this supposed Golden Week surge of activity in bullet train use at all.

Anyway, fast forward a few hours, and I found myself back in Tokyo one more time. I had cancelled and rebooked my exact lodging a couple of times over the past week, and the one I finally settled on was a 3-storey building with rental apartments in the Yoga (Youga) neighbourhood in Western Tokyo, not far at all from Sangenjaya and the gyoza festival that I had visited the other day.

The outside of the building looked like this:

This is the view from halfway up the stairs leading to my room (unit 205):

And the outside of my room:

The inside of the room was rather small, though not as tiny as the one I was in for a full week just last week. The actual living room was cozy:

But the toilet was awfully cramped. And there was no bidet. Is this even really Japan without a bidet?

I liked this table so much that I moved the television onto the floor and moved the table to the couch where I would spend most of my next 3 days when in the apartment. The table was at the perfect height and size for my laptop.

There were stairs leading up to a loft area with a bed, but I never used this. The wooden stairs were rickety and the rungs were not horizontal (they were turned a little and spaced rather far apart so coming down it was a bit painful and dangerous), and the upstairs neighbour was noisy so the last thing I wanted was to put my head and ears closer to them. I just slept on the wide couch with all the provided pillows and sheets instead.

This is the view out the window, mind the meshing:

Nearly all Airbnb and Booking.com and other rental places have little guidebooks explaining how to do things around the house, how to check in/out, and interesting places nearby. This particular entry made me laugh though:

And later on in the evening, I found two friends hiding in the storage closet that lacked a handle but that I pried open using a hook placed at the top of the door:

After resting for a bit, I then went for a walk around the neighbourhood, looking for dinner as well as interesting sights. I walked from my local station, Yoga Station, all the way to the neighbouring station, Sakura-Shimmachi Station, and then walked all the way back. This took about 15 minutes each way.