Internet for dummies

Well, the internet saga continues (thanks to a night of Slats and Cratz in Akkeshi at our friend Thomas’s house, this post is seen). Because of non-existent communication skills on my part and bad wiring, we now need “construction” on our house in order to get internet. I believe that means we need a land line installed before we can get the ‘nets, for about $75 of course. Now, in the States, even with a land line needing set up, the whole process might take a few days. One day for the phone company to set up the land line, one day for the internet provider to get things working. Not here. After applying for internet in the first week of August, we are set to get connected, at the soonest, on September 16. Yes, a month and a half to get internet. This is not at all uncommon either. Simply put, Japan has an amazing ability to make easy things very, very VERY (too much emphasis? I think not) hard. Take our washing machine for instance. I have discovered that we might be the only JETs, or perhaps the only people in all Hokkaido who have a washing machine* that not only has to be manually hooked up to the shower faucet, but must also be drained into the shower as well. This means that in order to do a load of laundry, a hose must be run from the washer to the shower, the faucet turned on to medium strength and then another hose directed to spray the waste water out onto the shower floor and down the drain. This doesn’t seem so bad until you complete every step but the one involving putting the waste water hose into the shower room. The result would be Corin yelping from the dining room, me running into the dining room from the kitchen to see what the commotion was about and seeing two inches of water (and more gushing from the hose) standing on our nice wooden floors. Commence scramble for every porous item we own. Unfortunately, I was doing a load of towels at the time…so instead of things designed to soak up liquid, we used blankets, sheets, pillow cases, and possibly a duvet were thrown on the puddle. The big sopping mess was then plopped into the shower room and destined to be dealt with (read: thrown out in the morning trash) later.  Needless to say, but I’ll say it anyway, I don’t think I’ll be forgetting the drain hose any time soon.

Keeping the house clean has been a bit of an adventure, considering we live next to a baseball field without a speck of grass on it. The wind doesn’t blow too much but every surface of the house is substantially dusty on a weekly basis. As I don’t mind doing the majority of the cleaning, I “assigned” Corin to swiffering and mopping duty. I would rather have my own foot chopped off then mop, so it’s a pretty sweet deal. Corin set about the other week to complete his first time of swiffering our tiny apartment. I was sitting on the couch, sipping sweet tea and munching on crumpets, of course, when Corin called out from the kitchen inquiring where he could find the swiffer clothes. I replied that they were under the sink and considered the case closed and the floors as good as clean. A few minutes later I hear Corin swiffering away in the kitchen, but the sound wasn’t quite right. I asked him what exactly he was doing and he replied, “swiffering!” I asked what he was using and he replied “the cloth thing.” Then he entered the dining room area and I took a hard look at the swiffer. Something didn’t look right. I asked him to show me the cloth but he resisted, convinced he was using the right instrument. Finally, the scraping sound of whatever he had attached to the bottom of the swiffer caused me to get up, pick up the broom mid “swif” and burst out laughing. Corin didn’t look amused.  Instead of a swiffer cloth, he had somehow affixed a mesh bag** to the bottom of the swiffer. The material was sort of picking up dust, but only because he had been enthusiastically rubbing the floor with this nylon material for the last few minutes. He is still not as amused as I am by this mix-up...

And now we prepare for our first typhoon by eating kaiten sushi and hanging out with our friends in Akkeshi. The windows are locked, the wind rattles the panes and the rain falls. Another week ends in the land of the ridiculously early rising sun.

*You know what else would be nice? Dryers. Yes, I am tired (already) of laundry taking three days to go from dirty to clean and dry. And having my underwear hanging out to dry, in all its Victoria’s Secret glory, while our school clerk and two repairmen lumber through the apartment fixing screens.

**To his credit, these bags are also stored under the sink. And they are folded flat in such a way that it’s hard to tell they open into a bag. Their purpose is quite different from a swiffer cloth, although they both serve to catch dirty things. Because we have no garbage disposal, these bags are put into a canister that sits in the drain in our sink. The bags catch any food that might be remaining on dishes before it plummets down the drain. This continues until the sink fills with water and clues us in to the fact that there’s so much crap caught in the mesh that the water can no longer go down the drain. Then the canister is removed, the water gushes down the drain, the bag in its gooey, stinky glory goes into the trash and a fresh bag goes in its place. It’s a beautiful cycle, clearly.