moving sucks

I don't suppose I have to tell anyone in the world that packing and cleaning a place in preparation to move out is not a fun task. When I was a kid (since I NEVER moved) I saw moving as a sort of cleansing, a time when you were forced to clean and sort carefully (because if not forced to do these things I could always find a better use for my time) all your possessions. When I heard people say "That got lost in the move," I could never understand it. In my mind, you FOUND stuff when you were moving, stuff hidden in places you would not have seen had you not emptied your house.

I think some of these notions still hold on because I was hoping to find treasures as I took apart my place. Mostly I just found dust, lots and lots of hidden dust.

I also found that my previous conviction that I would make it out of Japan with no more than my two allowed suitcases was pure folly. I've been here for three years; I've amassed a good ton of junk. I knew this, but I assumed that this would all be 'junk' that I would just leave behind, whether as give-away stuff or as trash.

Right.

So I bought three boxes for shippin' stuff back, and given three boxes, I've now filled three boxes. Since my sorting/cleaning choices expanded from pack, give, or throw away to pack, give, throw, or ship, several odds and ends have been literally chucked into the box area of the living room (I lined them up side by side in a corner and then would just fling things into that direction if I wanted to ship it).

I'm still throwing out and giving away a good deal of stuff, of course; I got rid of 31 kilos of used clothing, not all of it mine, a bit over a week ago. To the stayers go the spoils, and I've been dividing up my stuff amongst the staying ALTs and my successor, mostly 'useful' things and 'pretty' things. I can't believe I have to be out of there by the end of the week, although the walls are finally bare (and that does help it look more like progress).

I traded the tall couch for a short one, better suited for sitting at the kotatsu come winter, and I traded back my kotatsu for the one Sam and Carl had (I gave them the giant one that hardly fit in the room and took their tiny one that couldn't fit Carl's legs under it). I'm leaving the vanity, the green chair, the denki carpet, the kitchen unit, the bike, the heater.

But moving stuff around in this heat is anything but a fun pastime. I have interrupted the process frequently for social and other excursions, like visa-getting trips to Himeji, parties with leavers and stayers (as a leaver myself)... the weekend of the 21st was a sort of "party all the time" wherein we spent basically the whole weekend kicking it with Shiso all over town. I'll do posts about all that (as well as.. I suppose... my bye-bye work events). But there's no putting it off forever, and the process has been slow and painful and hot and painful and slow.

So it goes!

I did find some things I had squirreled away, forgotten, or thought lost.

This is something I mentioned in my farewell speech, unaware that I did still have it in my house. It's a talisman-like gift from a school excursion from back when the current 3rd-years were in the 6th grade. It says something like "Emily-sensei, please make fun memories with us." In writing my speech (writing, not even saying, just pre-work), the thought of including a reference to this object followed by the question, well, did we? would cause me to leak tears on my desk.

This is just a man-en with a different version of birds on the back of it than usual. I'm gonna have to spend this, though, cause that is a hundy right there.

This is a twenty, and though they are rare, I've somehow been in possession of several of them over the course of my time. I am gonna spend this too, cause I think I have one back home. 

Back of the 20.

This isn't something I lost, it's just something I thought was kind of funny and wanted to share.. try to ignore the total chaos and... Above my kitchen table I had placed a picture of Siena, Italy, because there was a larger version of a very similar picture above the table where I often at at the Centro in Rome. I created my own version of that place here, right after I moved in. 

Anyway, all these various treasures don't really make up for the fact that moving sucks, it really really sucks, even more so when it's hot and your house doesn't have 'real' AC, and topping that off, you don't really WANT to leave, you just kind of have to.

Two Weeks

I just got back from Jusco with the temporary solution to this week's latest problem: a USB keyboard. I thought I could get along without the A key until such time as someone else magically fixed my computer (or, in the land of wishful thinking, it returned miraculously to normal)... but the on-screen keyboard, which saved my ass in the login to Windows (as my password may or may not have the letter A IN IT SOMEWHERE), very quickly became a nuisance method of dealing with the issue. The problem, by the way, isn't random. I spilled water on my computer and am damn lucky I only lost the letter A. I spilled water because I was using it on the floor of my room, having dragged the internet box to the limit of its cord (booby trapping the doorway in the process) so it could share the AC and therefore, apparently, function properly. Oi.

It's been a long, action-packed couple of weeks as we wind up to wrap up this JET year with a bang, and a whisp of smoke. I went far too long without sleeping in, but finally this morning was able to sleep til 10. At last!

What's been going on, the crowd asks. Oh, so so many things.

I had my little hell week, where everything was due at once at the end, which does happen from time to time if you have exactly nine of your ten fingers in nine different pies. Friday was the due date for our Tokyo Orientation Presentation, which was a technological and time-managing pain in the collective ass. This year, they combined the seminars for Japanese Language Study and Japanese Etiquette, reducing them from 50 minutes each to about 21 (if you make room for intro, etc). Excellent. Excellent. Then have four people across the country all trying to file share using different computers and different restrictions at work which allow or do not allow certain up or downloads... it's all pretty much a mess.

Simultaneous to this, I was getting ready for the Shorinji Kempo test I said I'd back out of but never got around to escaping. I was woefully underprepared, and I was cancelling other commitments left and right in order to just, goodness, make a good show of it. I did pass, of course, but not smoothly and beautifully and without wanting to cry. That was on Saturday. Which was also a work day. Not really a work day, but we were required to either show up or use nenkyuu (unacceptable), so I showed up, and attended as many of the sports teams' games as I could (judo, girls' table tennis, softball, girls' volleyball) before rushing home to suit up and roll out to testing.

Sunday, I went to Kyoto to see Dre again, and we passed a very pleasant day exploring a temple his professor had suggested, Tofuku-ji. We then surprised-called Nami and had dinner with her and her husband at their house. I crashed with Dre, and on Monday morning, which was a day off because of working Saturday, pushed onward to Universal Studios Japan.

From 2011_07_10

Which was also enormous fun; that Hollywood Dream rollercoaster just fills me with joy. It's like flying, with all the smooth sheer terror that entails. Rode it three times. We also enthusiastically participated in super-wet-time on Jurassic Park ride, which was awesome and we rode twice. USJ is excellent, but it pays to go on a schoolday.

A very sunny weekend, as well.

From 2011_07_11

But as you can see, this was a full weekend, and I hit the ground running Tuesday by doing 5 classes at elementary, followed by a 2-class Wednesday with moving in the afternoon. Thursday was more elementary, and Friday was just all day moving.

Moving, you say? Yes, we're moving. To the new school building. The kids march like ants, all toting something as we make our way up the ramps from one building to the next. Since the new building is about two car lengths from the old, we didn't have to port that stuff too far.

There's the ramp leading in!

From 2011_07_08

A view of the new staff room; you can see the old one through the window.

From 2011_06_22

I'm pretty excited about the fact that the new staff bathroom has real toilets and is not going to be a dark, dank cavern with two squatty-potties in it.

From 2011_06_22

This shows how close the other building is... they needed the extra space for building, so they sealed off the bathrooms on each floor, which jutted out of the old building by each stairwell, and just knocked them out of the way.

From 2011_06_22

New atrium area facing the Somegochi River. Space, air, and light.. all things the old building did not have this much of.

From 2011_06_22

This photo is from the day they let us run around and look at the new building before it was totally done. Here are the kids back on the other side, hard at work.

From 2011_06_22

So, yeah.. we're moving. My file cabinet is being taken away for space reasons (the new staffroom is, for some reason, smaller than the old one), so I've had to collapse my storage. I think people believe that since I am not always there, I couldn't need much space. Except.. the reason.. I am not always there.. is because... I do... Elementary. Which as you may be aware, requires a crapload more in the way of supplies, toys, brightly colored things, etc. No one understands us, *headdesk* et al.

This weekend was a three-day-er, thank heavens, so we spent Saturday in Osaka for the Harry Potter EndTimes; expectations were high after our 7-week lead-in of awesomeness, watching one movie a week until this weekend, but expectations were met by the movie. I'm still rolling it around in my mind as I clean up my damn house, because the first thing to fall apart when I don't have time to do anything is the state of my house. It's maddening, that, but I'm not sure how to prioritize cleanliness when I have to be out the door in thirty seconds. Also I just received/bought a bunch of stuff from some leaving JETs, so I have to integrate that into my house, sift out things I don't have room or need for, find out what to do with them. It's trickle-down stuff, so I'll probably have stuff to give away come August, hopefully stuff the newcomers will want.

Oh and of course, in the background to all this, rainy season gives way to HOT season, typhoons still roll in to drench us with much-needed rain.. the backyard is a jungle, at least for now, until the horrific heat turns that thriving weed-patch into a gravel pit, and I am getting ready to lose some very good friends and adventure-partners to the wilds of their futures back in North America. It's very important during this time to be able to make time to spend with those who won't be around Shiso much longer, especially considering I am leaving on the 23rd myself for Tokyo.

I'm also getting ready for Tokyo Orientation, a trip to Amerika, and the hosting of August guests. And trying to keep up with my extracurriculars on the side. Oh, and writing letters.

And I actually have three classes tomorrow. Which is preposterous, because it really should, by all rights, be summer vacation by now.

My apartment is finally coming together, I am, more or less, (and I'm rather shocked by this, myself) on top of my shit. I've even.. kind of.. started to pack! I will do more of that this evening, no doubt, and maybe clean some more. I made the unfortunate discovery of mold in my house this year, something you never wanna find, but which is sometimes difficult to prevent when you don't have AC.

Apartment Sweet Apartment (aka, Better Homes and Gardens)

I mean, I never wanted a clean slate. I wanted a ragtag assortment of other people's junk so I could be creative with making it my own living space and then not feel too attached to it so that leaving it behind wouldn't be a big deal.

As you know, when I got here, there wasn't a lot of stuff. Over time, I accumulated stuff from leaving JETs and nonJETs alike, and bought stuff at the recycle shop because basically everything there is on sale. But my apartment was always kind of a work in progress, and I always kind of had the vague notion that I was going to do something with it, sometime.. or maybe I would never get around to it, but oh well...

But it bothered me, and I knew this when I spent an afternoon one day upon return from work measuring the rooms and furniture and cutting out scale models in graph paper so I could see what would fit where. I had gotten to the point where I had collected too much furniture.

Over the course of the time I've been here, I've also tried to make improvements to the "yard," as well as brought home lots of little houseplants to keep around. I've gotten compliments for being the only one to have anything alive in her house, and I always blame it on my mother.

Let us look at the photographic evidence: How Lem got her crap together.

Stage One: It Was Like That When I Got Here

The stuff: Bed, bookshelf, mirror, blue couch, end table, wire table, TV and stand. Fridge, table& chairs, and kitchen accessories (rice cooker, water heater).
The yard: despair

I really liked my predecessor, and so at first held to this strange belief, rather staunchly, that if it was good enough for her, it was good enough for me..! Not taking into consideration the fact that she really didn't live like this, with this setup and this furniture, not really. Since she was the only person leaving my year, she naturally would give her stay-another-year friends first crack at the household goods, and since they would not at that time be overwhelmed with all the furniture they could eat, I'm fairly sure everyone took something.

Still and all, the Spartan basics weren't so bad.

From Drop Box

I put a bunch of photos on the front of the fridge. Got a couple houseplants.


Laundry time







As for the yard, I had a strip of gravel and two dead trees. I remember reading the myth of Demeter and believing (it made sense to me, okay?) that the "barren season" of the year was winter. I mean, that's when it's too cold to grow. That's why harvest festivals are in the fall, etc. But actually, in Greece and other Mediterranean places, and in lots of places it turns out, sometimes the hardest time to grow things is the summer under that punishing sun. So far, my yard has always looked like crap in the summer, not only when I first arrived, but also after my first year. It's just too hot for many things to live out there.


I love this photo. Two dead trees and a PVC pipe.


View from the road.


Dead tree as seen from bedroom window.

AUTUMN 2009: The Recycle Shop is Your Friend

Acquisitions: desk, more shelves, assorted cute things (like the clock, sitting cushions)

Moves: bookshelf into living room, fridge to corner of kitchen, giant trashcans to outside

Yard: Let's Garden the Shit Out of It

Through the fall, I sort of settled down and collected a few things it was nice to have.

Here's the video walkthrough from that time.


October, I was proud of my ikebana, and this shows the clock on top of the TV.


More ikebana leftovers, but this is sitting on top of some of the new shelving I got for the kitchen. This means that by now (October 9th, 2009), I had moved the fridge and trashcans as well as put my dishes on this shelf.


The yard got its first dose of gardening one day when Julie and I made a hundred dollar trip to Agro Garden.


Post-Thanksgiving consumption of leftovers, 2009. You can see the bookshelf and fridge have been moved.

WINTER 2009-2010: Baby, It's Cold Outside. And Inside.

Acquisitions: Heaters (kerosene, electric, and hot water bottles). Odds and ends.

Changes: basically no

January, photographs of snow show yard unchanged. Still got dead trees, PVC, and a little garden.


February. Desk still in bedroom, but covered with houseplants.


February, my living room can still host the whole town.

From 2010_02_16

SPRING 2010: Dibs

Acquisitions: bicycle, more planters. Kotatsu and big white couch, lamp (George left Japan).

Moves: blue couch into bedroom

Yard status: blooming

George left Japan in the spring and I bought a bunch of his stuff.

More of the same. Garden still alive, PVC pipe finally moved, trees still dead.


In April, the tulips bloomed through the pansies.


The new/old kotatsu is my new source of happiness.


Couch, likewise.


To compliment the interior's new look, I improved other stuff too.




SUMMER 2010: The apartment feels brighter and more awesome this way.

Acquisitions: Heke's green chair, the promise of Julie's many planters.

Yard status: tomatoes, and pumpkin vine.. but then when I left for 2.5 weeks, everything died.

When we turn the kotatsu sideways against the wall, we can still have a million people playing games.


But when the old JETs were leaving and getting rid of their stuff, I managed to buy Heke's chair (and dehumidifyer), and I got Lana's spice rack. This meant moving the white couch to make room. I also bought a floor chair to go with the kotatsu.

Tomatoes.


I took this photo to show the little green frog, but you can see that the couch has been pushed to the window.


This was about the time I started looking for ways to rearrange or possibly get rid of something, since things didn't quite fit.

To Present:
Then, one day in the fall, we went to visit Lauren who had totally redone her apartment from the way it had been with her predecessor. She'd installed all kinds of mood lighting and arranged things in a way that fit her personality.

I went home and tore my place apart. It took me a long time to put back together, but once I did, I went to the recycle shop again to get lamps. I realized that my living room was set up to focus on the TV, which was stupid, as I kept telling the NHK lady, I don't watch TV, not even DVDs all that often, and there was no reason for that to be the most important feature of the room!

I inherited Julie's planters and slowly but surely spent a little time here and a little time there filling them up. My first dead tree fell down in a storm, so I kicked the other one down and tore it out of the ground with my gloved hands. I got a sweet olive tree (though very small) to put in the spot of the first dead tree, and a nandina to go in the spot of the second. I reinstalled pansies.

Now, my house looks like this! (click on it to go to the album and see them at your own pace)



The only difference being that since these were taken, I have expanded the ground garden a bit.

From 2010_12_22

From 2010_12_22

Here are my "Christmas morning snow photos" for that:

I'm going to do a post soon with photos from my new furniture arrangement. It's funny because it almost resembles my very first arrangement again, only.. not.

So just for old time's sake, here's this: http://eminihonde.blogspot.com/2009/09/inside-my-domicile.html, for kicks, because my house in September had FAR LESS CRAP IN IT than it does now.. my challenge lately has been making it all fit.

And lest we forget what my yard once looked like, I give you this and this.


Because I hope the new images of this year's winter garden will subsequently blow your mind.

If there were a kilter, we’d be a bit off it.

This is the new story of my life: I keep thinking I’ll do things, and then I never do them. Mostly I have good reasons for it, but it’s still lame as an overall experience.

Things have been outside of normal for, oh around a month now.. ever since graduation, mostly, things at work have been changing, and being on vacations, and having visitors (not me personally, but our ShisoJETparty-all-the-time has been lately, well, a party all the time)… and there isn’t anything wrong with a party all the time provided of course that you are not trying to have work alongside it. I got some new furniture, so my apartment is completely different than it ever was (so if I refer to my “new apartment,” I did not move, I just rearranged out of necessity to accommodate the new couch and the kotatsu, aka The Biggest Flat Surface In The House). I’m still going to write about Kyoto, Tokyo, and Okinawa, and also the Himeji bike ride I helped to captain. Or I might not, since I think the photo sets are like photojournals in a way, and the visual might be the most interesting part!

Suffice to say I’ve had a lot of stress lately.. both good stress and bad stress, unexpected incidents and things I should have anticipated but somehow miraculously failed to.. I thought I would have a whole day Wednesday at my desk (because I had one class scheduled.. ONE), and I mostly did, but it was interrupted by the fact that, oh man! I have to make elementary lesson plans! And now I make them bilingual, so it takes about four times as long. THEN I was interrupted by the destructive antics of our Most Disruptive Student, who is usually such a good-natured little delinquint, I was totally not bothered when he came raging into the staff room Wednesday after lunch (someone had spray painted his bike with pink) because he and I are cool. He doesn’t participate in my class, but he always says hello to me in the hall. For example:

Kid: Hello!

Me: Hi! What’s up?

Kid: I .. am.. CHAMPION!

Me: Of what?

Kid: eh?

Me: (in Japanese) What kind of “CHAMPION”?

Kid: …………… Champion of WORLD.

Me: hahahaha, awesome. Okay be careful, don’t climb on the roof today.

So anyway, it startled the bloody freaking hell out of me when he kicked a plastic bucket and made it explode into shards. I began to pay attention to his words, which included “important thing” and “break/ruin”… he and his circle of big male teachers orbited near my (now conveniently at the center of the room) desk and the VP and other female teachers were like, Emily, come here.

And I was like, no, man, I don’t want to leave my desk, first of all this kid should not be allowed to disrupt me (not as in ‘they should physically subdue him,’ but as in ‘I am not scared of this kid and I do not believe he would lay a hand on me and if he did, I could probably take it.’), but second of all, I couldn’t tell if he was griping about his own PERSONAL “important thing” that had been “ruined” or if he was planning to ruin some other important thing. I realized right then that NOT standing between this kid and my precious little computer, lifeline of all I do, was not what I wanted. I mournfully looked at it and considered taking it off the desk with me into the hall, but I didn’t want to be THAT GIRL so I followed the other teachers out and sulked around. It was a beautiful day, that day.

Which is a comparative RARITY which is another problem: Spring has been cancelled due to lack of hustle? There are notable exceptions. Wednesday is one. The Himeji bike ride weekend is another. On the whole, the weekdays are shitty (rainy, grey, cold… right now it’s 10C. TEN.) and the weekends are a bit warmer with more sun, which is not too bad a deal I guess.. five for two. But the overall sluggishness of spring’s arrival is really annoying.

Anyway, that was a tangent. What I am trying to talk about is how Wednesday I guess I must have gotten a lot done, but it was none of the blogging/photoworking/recon I had hoped to do. I actually did not have time. When I am at work, basically, I do work stuff.

Which is how it should be, I guess, and I am getting used to that. But it’s still an expectation shift from doing all sorts of things for myself in those brief days of spring holiday.

My new teachers are pretty cool. I have mixed feelings about Miss Piggy-sensei. She is sweet enough, but I swear she has not yet HAD a good day. Every single time I see her she is suffering from something. Trouble is, she whines and sits there while the teacher on the other side of her (Hot Band Teacher) sneezes into her handkerchief, then glares at the handkerchief like she is SO NOT OKAY with having a cold because, man, she just has SHIT TO DO. I can really identify with not having patience with colds. It’s a far better mental place to be than the moany-complainy place, anyway. But oh, MP-sensei has a cold, or oh, a sore throat, or oh, her stomach hurts.

I mean maybe she’s just having a bad… three and a half weeks, right?

Miraculously, somehow, the classes I’ve had with her (three so far) and the first years have been more or less Wonderful. I won’t ask you to identify with the thrill of standing in front of fourteen Japanese children all grunting the “short u” sound in unison, but anyone who ever tried to get their kids to say “BIRD” instead of “BAADO” will feel me here. The last two weeks we’ve had what I guess I can call “phonics Friday” where we tackled vowels, first short, today long, and wrestled them to the ground.

Seriously, today I did a listening quiz that was brutal. I gave them a handout with squares, and letter sets like “P __ N” and “N ___T” four times each. Then I had them write the vowel in while I chanted “PIN” then “PEN” then “PUN” then “PAN” at them. Meccha muzukashii, since in Japanese, the short A, short O, and short U are all just “a”.. but I’ll be darned if they weren’t volunteering to put letters in the giant squares on the board, getting it right and making mistakes and generally just being awesome all over the place.

Partly this is thanks to Miss Piggy-sensei, because she asked me if we could do phonics for the whole lesson. Somehow between her suggestions and my materials and lack of accent (see: some Americans pronounce PIN and PEN the same) and coffee induced enthusiasm, we are hot to go. Partly the kids are just awesome. The first-year group (frogs, I’ve called them) is, I think..? made up of a lot of oxen (by the Chinese zodiac system), which happens to be my animal too. The mice class is actually made up of a lot of rats/mice by that calendar, so I find that kind of fun. (But that class is starting to come out of its shell a bit under the tutelage of Sweetie-sensei, my 22-year-old team teacher)

Those are anecdotes.. there is, of course, more. Elementary with its triumphs, challenges, and changes. The BOE being more bullheaded than even me (well, we’ll see about that). The Himeji ride (along with seeing my graduated dog-class boys biking all the way to the HS in the town where I live all the way from the town where I work) has made me think seriously about biking as a mode of transportation. I am hoping to buy a decent bike very soon. My closet unit collapsed, so my clothes are everywhere (but I am getting a much cooler clothes thing from George since he is moving out this weekend)…  Making new friends, seeing old ones, seeing old ones change, seeing people get closer to you and others further away… Losing chances for shit, gaining chances for other shit. The long and short of it is I have a lot of (mostly good) stress going on!

Now we (I) am gearing up for Golden Week, too. This is a string of Japanese holidays which basically makes the first week of May vacay. I am going to Hong Kong, and I am excited about it. It’s one more, perhaps the capstone disruption to the long string of disruptions since graduation…

Sometimes I think I am wrong to imagine that there is such a thing as “normal life” here… but I know there was a time when I had a schedule and I understood it. It’s not that I don’t want to do the stuff I get to go.. just that there’s a balance. Costs to things. Lots of thoughts on that lately (good things and their costs).. I think I’ll perhaps distill a more coherent entry on that later, as well.

If I have a moment. In which to do so.

Hot Danger

I'm adding a new tag to the mix, "stupidity," which I will use to tag all the entries about stuff that happens wherein one of my first thoughts was "Whoa. I really need to not tell my mom about this because she'll worry unnecessarily." Having thought that, I still end up telling her about them, so there's no reason not to write about them here. Don't worry, dear readers, I've survived so far. Maybe the sharing of my stupidity will help others later scouring the net for answers to the same problem.

Today I will speak on the dangers of winter. Only dangerous when mixed with a good little does of stupid.

First: once upon a time, I almost started a fire in my house.

I may have mentioned before now that Japan is kind of cold. And that it has no insulation in the walls of buildings. Okay. Well to prevent death and hypothermia, there are heaters. They come in many shapes and sizes for many different uses.

There are huge round towers about two or three feet high, kerosene burners, which are installed in each room in the school. The halls are frigid, but the rooms can be pretty warm. I think when I told my fellow JETs I was getting a kerosene heater, they pictured one like this.

photo borrowed from a fellow JET's blog - she's a great insight into Japan and JET things! Check it out at http://yamaninjo.wordpress.com/

They expressed fears about open flames in my house. Little did they know... the real danger lurked not with my kerosene heater (although I did spill freaking kerosene ALL OVER the kitchen floor that one time...)

Compact, effective, and almost cute!

This thing, like all kerosenes, makes a pretty bad smell upon startup and turn-off, so I am always sure to ventilate well. And, it you so much as tap it accidentally, it shuts itself off immediately.

No, when I tried to burn the house down, I had to use more elementary measures.

Smaller electric heaters, called "stove"s are also to be found easily. I bought one when I was still searching for the perfect kerosene unit, and use it only rarely anymore. It's just a little space heater. Two wires that get hot and a grille to shield it from wayward material.

But the grille does nothing. Nothing I say! When you unseeingly kick a blanket onto the space heater. No really, I even smelled it and thought by way of a little joke, "it's funny that they call it a stove since it kind of smells like something is cooking."

Something WAS cooking.

Victim and culprit.

That blanket is super flame retardant, or the amount of time it spent on that heater should have set a lot more shit ablaze.


Second: once upon a time, I burned my foot so badly I had to buy new shoes to accomodate the blister that resulted.

To be continued...

Kotatsu

I've had a request to explain the kotatsu. Only too willing to oblige.

Here is the wiki on it, which has some helpful photos. Basically, it's a table with a heater underneath, and a skirt (comforter), and you sit under the skirt so it can keep you warm. In a country with very little central heating and next to no insulation at all, localized heat is very important. Without things like a kotatsu, you are in fact attempting to heat the whole prefecture if you essay to keep your entire homespace warm.

Relatedly, I suddenly feel less like people with heated toilet seats are "spoiled" and more like I seethe with envy when I consider their situation.

Robin Red

EDIT: I've gotten a good question in the comments which I'd like to answer here. I had intended to answer it in the entry proper, but was in a rush to post it before I went home (...because the last four days or so have been as overprogrammed as my high school and college lives.. seriously, directly from one class/activity to the next, and a little time for homework at the end).

So! Robin is a "rental," or so they call it here. It's more like a lease situation, because it's a rent-by-month instead of the way we rent-a-car for a few days in the US. She's around 150 a month, which includes insurance and all the maintenance, which honestly does wonders for my peace of mind. I was bad enough at stressing over English-speaking Jill, so I'm glad to hear that whenever Robin has any issues, all I have to do is bring her to her home and they'll handle it. They've also told me they will install a CD player soon, and snow tires in the winter.

And, even though she's a K-car, she's 4-wheel-drive. People have commented "you can drive her off-road!" ... sure. But then, I took my 96 Geo Prism off road, too. So..

Got a car. ^_^

On September 8th, actually. Bright red and shiny-new-looking, at least compared to what I’m used to.

Don’t get me wrong. I love the woodland creature beast that Jill became this summer. I miss her, even. But Robin Red has a different kind of charm which I’m still, admittedly, figuring out.

Pretty!

Yes, in Japan we drive on the left side of the road, which still freaks me out from time to time. And we sit in the right side of the car. Which is even weirder.

People in Japan back into their parking spots A LOT. I did it this time because of the direction I happened to be going when I got home.

Robin is a K-car, which means she has a scooter engine, basically.. not much power. Good brakes though.

But, what a car is, is freedom. And I intend to enjoy mine. I’m one of only a few JETs currently legally allowed to drive…

Inside my Domicile

In a recent letter, my friend asked why I hadn’t yet put up any photos of the interior of my house. The reasons are simple:
1. I hadn’t really thought about it yet.
2. It’s a work in progress. I don’t have much aside from what Lara left for me.
3. It’s really hard to get a telling angle on anything. Even when Lara sent me photos, I was completely unable to picture the place until I got here and saw it myself.
So I figured I’d go one better. I took a VIDEO TOUR for you!
Let’s watch!

Part two!

And, since my camera was flashing red numbers at me which turned out to be the memory card filling up (for the first time in its history?), here is PART THREE!
Let’s watch more!