Forrest Brown

A couple more photos of my apartment at the Hundred Stay Serviced Apartments near Shinjuku.

Last year when I was staying in Japan I rented a furnished monthly apartment near Tokyo Station that was really nice and convenient. But it was also a little strange because it was in an area that was almost all business offices. So all I saw when I went out around my apartment were people in suits. For this trip I decided to try staying in a different part of Tokyo and rented an apartment near Shinjuku.

I’m staying a the Hundred Stay Serviced Apartments and have rented one of their premier apartment. The apartment is really nice with a cool modern design. The apartment is on the 21st floor with floor to ceiling windows that give an amazing view of Shinjuku.

Panorama of the inside of my apartment in Tokyo

I’m moving into a new apartment.

While I was back in Los Angeles, I decided to move out of my apartment and put all of my stuff into storage. I was on a month to month lease and had been wanting to move for a while, but hadn’t had time to search for a new apartment. So it really didn’t make sense for me to keep renting the apartment if I was going to be in Japan for the next couple of months. And this forces me to get off my butt and find a new apartment once I return to Los Angeles.

Packing up and moving my stuff turned out to be a lot bigger job then I thought it would. It was pretty amazing how much stuff I’ve accumulated. I barely finished before heading back to Tokyo. I actually took the last load of stuff to storage as I was driving to the airport.

I never thought that taking a shower could be so complicated. It’s a good thing that my apartment came with a English users manual or I would never have figured it out. The biggest problem to solve was how to actually get hot water. The apartment uses a water heater that heats the water as it’s needed. The trick is that you need to turn it on each time that you want hot water, it then turns itself off when it senses the water has been turned off.

The shower is a little room that includes the shower, bathtub, sink, and clothes drier. When you take a shower everything gets wet. The bathtub is a little square thing that definitely doesn’t look like it would be good for long soaks.

The shower area has it’s own ventilation and heating controls. There’s a setting for drying out the shower after using it. One cool thing is that there is a setting for drying your clothes. Hang your wet clothes in the shower area, hit the correct button and warm dry air is circulated through the shower area.

While I’m in Tokyo, I’m renting a monthly furnished apartment about 5 minutes walk from Tokyo Station. The apartment in very nice, but crazy tiny compared to my apartment in LA.