Base Point

I’ve been following the Tofugu website/blog thing to provide hints for what I can and should do while in Japan.

Today, I figured it was time to nerd out and visit a co-working space to compare the experience to Canada. Tofugu had a post specifically about a location called Base Point, and after a couple minutes of research, it seemed like one of the only co-working options that allowed renting the space at a smaller granularity than just per-month.

Makayla and I are practially train masters at this point, so heading to Shinjuku wasn’t even a concern.

I’ve noticed a pattern with Japan compared to my other travel to western Europe (“Sweden Sweden Number One”): the English here is far less strong. This can be a challenge - the other day, I got overcharged on a cabbage dish, but I didn’t want to handle the language barrier to argue about it - but can also be a benefit: today at Base Point, I had to communicate about pricing, and I was required to remember the Japanese number words.

By being in an environment where you have to continually work with the language, you’re less likely to fall back to English.

Anyways, Base Point was pretty rad. It was cool to compare my surroundings to the exact photos taken in the Tofugu article because it’s kinda not really ~ish like being in the same location a movie was shot. I took some photos of my own:

The pricing was weird: around $5 CAD per hour, or ~$20 CAD for the day. However, you can only stay for the full day if you’re a member, which had its own cost. I was expecting this to be fairly expensive to deter one-time-usage of the space, but the sign-up cost was ~$2 CAD.

Additionally, lunchtime food was nicely priced at ~$9 CAD, which is a lot better compared to the restaurants Makayla and I had been visiting throughout the week.

My sister spent her time meandering the streets, drifting in and out of stores. She mentioned that she was lost in a yarn and fibre/fabric store for over an hour.

She had a neat-o experience at a spa place that offered a “Dr Fish” option; basically you stick your feet into a tank of water and let the little fishies nibble your feet. Apparently it’s excruciatingly ticklish. I’ll take her word for it.

For supper, we finally made our Sushi Debut. Our waitress inquired if our appetites were going to actually be big enough to consume all that we had ordered (a seafood roll, a salmon/cream cheese roll, and a 15 piece plater of Nigiri) and I’m pretty sure she was impressed when we polished it all off.

It was a good day: ate a lot of food, did a lot of sitting around. As a lazy person, it was “gucci”.