Sean's apartment - Mar 21

Sean came and picked us up in order to escort us to his apartment. It is a fairly long, but quite direct, subway ride. That's apparently when he gets his reading in. From the subway it's about a 15 minute walk to his apartment.
On the way to his apartment we stopped for lunch in a Western steak and burger restaurant. The waitresses were dressed like cowgirls, but it wasn't particularly American western food, just non-Japanese (except for the fact everything was served with rice). Burger means what we used to call Salisbury steak. Sean had a burger with curry, Dave had a burger with pineapple, and I had a burger with cheese sauce. In Japan burgers in a bun are hamburgers, burgers without a bun are burgers.
It is a high rise building in a complex of similar apartment blocks that used to be public housing, and as such, is fairly new and well planned (grocery store, post office, etc. included) and is right next to a park. Sean is on the 5th floor.
His apartment is really quite spacious, particularly for one person. It has an LDK (living dining kitchen) which runs across the building from side to side, so he has a smallish kitchen window (on the walkway) and large living room and bedroom windows (on to a narrow balcony, largely used for drying clothes). His LDK has wood floors, and his bedroom has tatami mats. His bedroom furniture consists of a futon (in Japan, futon means "mattress" for sleeping on the floor). His living room has a large TV (also used as computer monitor) accompanied by computer and game console, exercise bike, hand weights, "couch" (kind of - a mattress that folds up into a couch shape), and low coffee table. When he needs more furniture he can take a legless chair out of the closet. His dining room contains a wood table with two normal height chairs. His kitchen is much larger and better equipped than I envisaged - he has a frig, microwave, toaster over, and rice cooker of his own, and it has two built in burners. And both open and closed shelves for storage (he did purchase some of the open shelves himself).  His bathroom contains a shower/bath room, a toilet room, and a sink room with his washing machine. Everything a single man could need!
Sean then escorted us back to the subway station, and our train. We managed to get the rest of the way home by ourselves. We celebrated with a Starbucks!