It's, sometimes, a very inconvenient place.

Ok, so hi everyone.  I realize it's been a couple of weeks since I brought up making a blog about living out here.  This wasn't a result of laziness!  No sir.  I was merely waiting until your anxiety and longing had reached it's peak, you see.  Now that we've reached that crest, it's my sincere honor and privilege to unveil, finally, this blog.  Please look forward to more entries.

Part of that was a lie.

So far, life here hasn't allowed for very much free time.  We've spent the first week here adjusting.  Moving can be stressful, and this one was particularly so.  Never mind the fact that we're half the globe away from everything and everyone we've come to know.  Japan is a wacky and unpredictable city.  Doubly so when the space-phone you've relied upon for fixing all of life's problems ceases to function.  If we get lost in the city, whoops, no working Google Maps.  Or say we have a problem with our banks.  For example, what if we go to pay our first month's rent and our credit cards are declined?  What are we going to do, call them at 3 in the morning (EST) from the apartment holder's home and demand an explanation?  Being out of touch with your normal go-to's leaves a person feeling floaty and uneasy.  

The streets here aren't named.  That was a bitch.  They work on a very different system.  We, for instance, live at 2-5-8.  That means we're in Toyotama-kita's 2nd district, 5th block, building 8.  If Tokyo were built more like a modern American city, with roads and blocks in discrete grid patterns, I suppose I'd prefer a system of named roads going in numerical order.  Such is not the case here.  Tokyo is enormous.  It's a sprawling metropolis, and its roads are about as uniform as Boston's.  Some places more so than others.  This results in maps being kind of useless to the uninitiated.  We thought it might be easier to take the subway to our home.

Good lord.  We weren't even sure where were WERE on this map.  (ACTIVITY TIME: trace the dark purple line from 新宿 to 新江古田)  Instead we opted for a taxi.  Nice guy.  Very understanding of two nervous white kids in Tokyo.  He even helped us get our luggage in and out of the cab.  It's not normal here, but I tipped him for his help.  More on that later.

Our apartment is on the 4th floor.  That's an unlucky floor here in Japan.  Something about how 4 (四 shi) is pronounced the same way as in death (死 shi).  So...goody.  More practically speaking, we're on the fourth floor of a building that's in one of the most seismically active areas in the world.  That's not just paranoia talking either, we have huge cracks in our walls from floor to ceiling.  It even ripped through the washroom's tiling.  Thankfully we're no higher off the ground than that, but that building across the way seems to loom ominously.

It's Monday, today.  That means it's trash day.  One of them, at least.

Today is burnable trash.  I know the sign LIES.  I've made this mistake already.  Our door says one thing, the hand out that our guesthouse lenders gave us says another, and the Nerima-ku main ward office has something else.  Don't worry, we have the days, the time, and the location sorted out.  All we need to do is make sure we sort our trash too!

T__T

Then there's THIS culture shock.  





I did forget to come back to those two white holes on the sides, didn't I?  So, if you want a bath of hot water, you need to first fill the tub with luke-warm straight from the faucet water.  This takes about 10 minutes or so.  Once the water level rises up over both holes, you turn that plunger to the last setting.  Then the water will circulate through the heater, making for a toasty tub.  Of course, that's after you turn on the gas and spark the pilot light.  I guess this has been trouble for other residents of the guest house, so they have this handy sign tacked up by the door.

It's really not so complex once you familiarize yourself with the process.

Speaking of washing, our washing machine is adorable.




It gets ugly if you try feeding him after dark though. Like most of the the apartments around here, we don't have a dryer. We get to hang our laundry. I kid you not, the first night it didn't even register to us that we wouldn't be able to dry our laundry after the sun set. Those clothes felt like sand paper in the morning.

So, moving in here wasn't the smoothest of transitions. But things are getting more natural here by the day. And we're finding more and more things to like about the place we live in. Like getting free fans with absurd designs everywhere we go.

Yes.