Dispatches, 2.

The globe is dying and this is the kind of artificial twilight that your parents warned you would ruin your eyes. I'm trying to read but it's Terry Pratchett who can't even hold my attention when the option is to pay full attention to the paper thin walls and the argument that they are barely containing.

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For the first time, we are forcing ourselves to get up with the alarm not because I've decided that we should, but because we'll otherwise miss our train. It is 1, maybe 2 degrees outside and there have been no stirrings from the corridor since my own midnight pee.

I can't decide why Osaka was such a foul letdown. It was no less gloomy and grey than any of the other cities we have visited, though perhaps lacked the redeeming feature that each other seemed to have.　Nagasaki is set at the foot of what would be ominous mountaints, were they not circuited by tiny winding streets and ancient temples. Hiroshima was friendly and open, with little old ladies at home and at one in the station. Osaka was somehow more tired and depressed, except for the cat cafe that we accidentally found in America-Mura. 18 cats, cake and an hourly rate.

Inside an alley, off a street next to a ghetto soviet style playground compound, left at the two stones, lies the warm little nest of Roujiya Guesthouse.