Would you like fries with that?

Most recent Sunday mornings have begun with me packing up my possessions in a rush so that I can vacate my lodging by its 10am check out time. One aspect of my life in Japan over the past year has been that I’ve stayed in more hotels and hostels than at any other time in my life. Thank goodness, then, that Japanese hostels have been of such a ludicrously high standard. I remember travelling around Spain and Italy for a month when I was 21 and a large number of the hostels were awful. This was particularly true in Italy where many of the hostels were run by religious groups. They would often have a 10pm curfew, be based in the drug-dealing centre of the city and chuck you out all day so that the rooms could be cleaned. Which was ironic, because the rooms were usually quite dirty when you returned.

In Japan, on the other hand, almost every place I’ve stayed has had something going for it. Staff have tended to be overwhelmingly helpful. And even though some of the rooms have been on the small side, I’ve not stayed anywhere that wasn’t reasonably clean.

One aspect of living in Japan is that your expectations as a customer change significantly. I noticed this immediately when I visited the UK in March. There are definitely bad sides to the Japanese way. God knows-the overly servile and clone-like impressions of some Japanese service personnel can grate and I sometimes do wish that people would just shut the f*** up and stop greeting me every time I turn a corner in a shop. But on the whole, it has been hugely refreshing to be treated so well here. There seems to be a much lower tolerance of shoddy service and expectations are just a lot higher than in the UK. I’ve really appreciated this during my time here. It’s always nice to be treated well. I rarely have to worry that the cheapest hostel will be a dive.

Euro 2012 starts today and I feel a bit weird to be so disconnected from it all. The current England team are both rubbish and totally unsympathetic. But if I were in the UK, it would be a really big deal and I’d be making all sorts of preparations about where to watch the games. I do enjoy the big tournaments but I will probably not see a single match of this one. England play on Monday at 5am local time and I will most likely be asleep.

In other news, I’ve booked my flight home. I return to the UK on 2^nd August. I may have a few days in Tokyo beforehand to say goodbye to Japan and get set for departure. After that, my lifestyle is going to change dramatically.