As predicted, it has been more chill since Shaz and Dad left – though a little more chill than we were expecting, since I caught a cold. (And now that I’m feeling better, Cassie seems to have caught it from me. Of course.
That said, we of course still did some things – it was Drew’s last few days! But, bad news: we fell back into old habits (old lack of habits?) and didn’t take a ton of pictures.
Oh, but first, it’s worth commenting on yesterday’s post: yes, I did shave my beard off, completely. It was for two reasons.
First, because I was sick and wanted to wear a mask when I went out like a good Japanese boy. I’d long suspected that my beard (rather than my massive head) was why masks hurt my ears so much, and it obviously made masks less effective, so I figured cutting it all off was a good call if I wanted to keep going out.
(It turns out I was absolutely right; my ears were fine even after a full day of wearing a mask out and about. Plus when I took it off to eat, I didn’t have a weird dent in my beard – because I didn’t have a beard to dent.)
But I’ve been wearing masks all COVID and haven’t shaved, so there’s obviously a second reason. If you’ve known me long enough, you may have heard me mention my “glasses” theory of beards. The gist is that beards are like glasses: some people look better after getting them, and some people look worse – but absolutely everyone looks worse after getting rid of them.
I figured that since I didn’t know anyone in Japan yet, now was my only real chance to go clean-shaven; once people knew me with a beard, it’d be too late to shave it off.
I don’t know that I like it – bathing is definitely easier, but ugh shaving every day sucks. Plus I really do like how I look with facial hair more than without. I’ll keep shaving for at least a couple weeks to give it a fair shot, but after that we’ll just have to see what happens.
I was talking about something else, though – oh, what we did the last few days. I dunno, we went out and explored Tokyo. We went to the Yellow Submarine, one of the most well known (one of the only?) board game shops in Japan.
Cassie and Drew went to Tokyo Tower:
And then we went to Harajuku to look around and get possibly the best cheeseburgers we’ve ever had in our lives. (The Great Burger, it was called, and oh man it was. The fries were also excellent.)
Drew left today; I’m writing this while waiting for Cassie to get back from the airport.
Expect things to be pretty quiet from us for the next week as we finish up our time in Toyko – but we’re looking at going to Hokkaido, the north island, next week, so we’ll probably get more active again then. Stay tuned!