Daily observations.

• Rice is either about to be cooked, in the rice cooker, cooling on the rack or stored safely in the fridge waiting to be eaten.
• Earthquakes are more like small talk and less like a natural disaster the longer you live here:
• "Hey, is the bed shaking?"
• "Yeah, I think so." 
• "Must be another earthquake."
• "Cool! Can we finish watching Entourage now?"
• In the summer, it rains more than the sun shines and fog rolls in at lunch time.
• Bowing to others repeatedly is expected, even when the subject of the bow is on the other end of the phone line. 
• Seeing pedestrian casualties on the side of the road is becoming the norm.
• Every room in my house can be equated to the size of some form of American closet (a bedroom the size of an ample walk in closet, a kitchen the size of a standard walk in closet, an entryway that doubles as a closet).
• Living without a dryer, garbage disposal, automatic hot water, dish washer and any counter space is the rule, not the exception.
• Dog walkers, taxi drivers and janitors all wear white cotton gloves to complete their jobs.
• A typhoon is the misbehaving love child of the Wyoming wind and a summer rainstorm. 
• If there is a harder way to do things, that is the way it will be done. Convenience is not a Japanese trait. 

The time has come.

After fifty days of being in country, we finally have internet. Thank goodness. I took Friday morning off to wait for the internet man to arrive, sometime between 9-12. He arrived around 11, located the phone box, explained what I'm sure was something very important (all in Japanese), repeated something about having a router, and left. I assumed the deed was done, except for the fact that when I tried out the internet, it didn't connect. I texted Corin that I hoped it would work when he got home and left for work. At 5 in the evening, we not only had a big box from Colorado waiting for us (thanks Amy and Jim!) but a note from a delivery company saying they'd missed us and would return, if they could, before six that evening. We had no idea what they were delivering but since the internet still wasn't working, hoped it had to do with a magic box that could connect us to the world.

Mmmm...brat in a baguette.

We waited around until 6:30 and then headed over to our friend Corey's house for some football: Raiders vs. Broncos. Although the game is played on a Monday night in the US, we're all at work on Tuesday and can't watch it in real time. Thus, we watch on Friday nights with the aid of bratwurst in baguettes and croissants and Boulder Kettle BBQ chips sent from loving mothers, plus a generous helping of 'the good stuff.' After the game we headed over to Veiled Cafe, a small bar run by a mother and son team. Corey has lived across the street from Veiled for quite a while, is a frequent visitor and was very warmly welcomed. Tetsu is the son part of the team and was rocking out in the particle board lined concert hall attached to the bar. As soon as we entered the room, Tetsu changed quite a few lines in each song to include Corey's name.

Particle board grunge.

Tetsu, the man himself.

We jumped around and used a tambourine to join in the revelry, then ended up playing a terrible game of darts with some of the regulars back in the bar. Even though we still lacked internet, I'd call it a successful way to start the weekend. After showing the notice to some Japanese English speakers, we discovered we had been informed to remain at home until 5 pm on Saturday and they would try to deliver again. So we waited, all day. Thanks to some serious rain, it wasn't too hard to want to stay inside and do nothing. At 4 pm, a nice delivery man dropped off the magic box and after dinner and grocery shopping, we ended the evening watching four episodes of Entourage on the real, live internet. I'd like to say the settling in period is finally over with, at least bills/basic needs wise.

I may also be lying to myself but don't tell me I said that.

Origami coffee, yumm!

Thanks to Respect for the Aged Day tomorrow and National Sport's Day next Friday, we'll be enjoying two three day weekends in a row. Some nice weather would be ideal for all this time off but alas, it has rained nonstop for the past two days. At least it makes for a good excuse to stay in and do close to nothing. I'm still nursing what seems to be the mystery injury of the year so anything that keeps me from pushing it too much is a good thing. No swelling, no bruising, no pain when walking or wiggling my ankle but once movement stops, or I start to run, it throbs like my bone is breaking in two. Might get up the guts to brave a hospital tomorrow and get it looked at by a professional.

Tonight has been spent trying to decide what the plan is for tomorrow. I vote another day like today, and yesterday. Listen to the rain, sip some Starbucks Origami Self Drip coffee, eat chips and guacamole for dinner and enjoy the nothingness. We're headed to Sapporo next weekend and I need to conserve my energy.

The never clean laundry conundrum.

After detailing my flooding of the apartment and Corin's use of the food strainer bag as a Swiffer cloth, I suppose I also have to share our never-clean laundry conundrum. I'm now convinced that after this adventure, we'll have housework down to a science. After about a month of living here, we ran out of the laundry detergent Lucy had left us. We headed out to the store, bought some liquid detergent and didn't give it another thought. After a month of washing clothes, I started to notice that stains weren't coming out and I was having to wash hand towels and dish cloths multiple times to get them smelling fresh. I was getting fairly frustrated that our already inconvenient washer wasn't even doing its job and was to the point of wanting to get an entirely new machine. I couldn't believe the detergent was just that terrible and even tried hand washing a few items to no avail. It never created suds and immediately dissolved in the tap water. I complained to Amy and Jim on Tuesday about just how frustrating it was and how I couldn't believe how anyone had clean clothes in this country. By Wednesday night I was back at our tiny wash basin scrubbing one of my favorite sweaters, attempting to get a stain out that hadn't been eradicated in the laundry. I grumbled and dumped more soap on the fabric, rubbing the cloth together and muttering that there were still no suds even after all I had poured on. Finally, I threw the sweater back in the wash and grabbed the bottle, scrutinizing the label. Then, I saw it. In tiny little letters on the left front side of the label: "Fabric Softener."

*facepalm*

Now, after a late night trip to the drug store on Thursday to pick up what I triple checked was in fact laundry detergent, we have fresh, stain-free laundry. The first time in nearly five weeks. Yes, I used almost an entire family sized bottle of fabric softener in place of detergent. Two things that bother me the most about this. One, knowing that my workout clothes have been rinsed only in water for the last 15 or so runs. Two, we don't even have the excuse that the label was in Japanese. The fabric softener was Downy and the entire label was in English.

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.

iPhones, oysters and the like

The second week brought a little more sleep and a lot more progress. Monday was another frustrating day of being told I still couldn’t purchase two cell phones at the same time, just because I was a foreigner. Corin had his welcome party, called an enkai, that evening and we soothed troubles with good friends and good drinks, plus a big plate of French fries. Tuesday, things looked better. With a fifth trip to the electronics store in mind, I decided to just use my American Visa and switch the billing later. Thanks to Lucy and a shiny little card, I walked out of the store with two new iPhones and a means of connecting to the outside world. My predecessor Lucy was indispensible through all of this, as her Japanese is perfect and mine is nonexistent. As the day closed, we said a sad good bye to Courtney and Joe as they embarked on their next journey back in England (Courtney is moving there after a short visit home to Australia). Wednesday was Lucy’s last day and we finished up all the loose ends I couldn’t have accomplished on my own. The next two days were filled with halting conversations with coworkers and learning how to communicate with only a few key words and lots of sign language. Difficult but not impossible, I’m happy to report. By Friday, we were ready for another weekend to begin. The Port Festival (Minato Matsuri) prompted all of us to Suehiro, Kushiro’s drinking district. The festival was started in 1948 to celebrate the 50^th anniversary of Kushiro opening its port to shipping. With my handy dandy calculator, I’d say that equals 113 years of Kushiro being a prominent port town. We watched old men and elementary school students pull huge ships down Highway 44 and took part in a two hour all-you-can-drink party with Chris, Shey, Corin and the two new ALTs that arrived last Wednesday, Tim (from New Zealand) and Ron (from Canada).  Saturday morning was marked, once again, by the baseball team being all too enthusiastic to practice on a weekend. The day was spent cleaning and relaxing, as most of our Saturdays seem to be spent thus far. On Sunday we hopped on the #12 bus to Kushiro Station and wandered the festival. We explored the EGG (the Ever Green Garden) and the MOO, Kushiro’s two prominent buildings down by the water. We even got to see synchronized unicycle dancing performed by grade school girls. The things they do for fun here in Kushiro.

Sunday night was definitely the highlight of our weekend, as we were invited to Mr. Sawano’s house for a fresh oyster BBQ. The town that our friend Thomas is working in is famous for their oysters. Akkeshi is about 40 minutes by car from Kushiro and Mr. Sawano drove up on Sunday morning to get a cooler full of the crusty molluscs. We were picked up by Aki and his wife, June, who had just returned from a visit to Kyoto to see her parents and their 21 year old son. June dropped the three of us off and we were ushered into Mr. Sawano’s backyard. There was a cooler of beer, a cooler of oysters, multiple skewers of chicken and pork, plus onions, green peppers, rice balls and little sausages. We ate like kings. I had never had oysters in any form before and although the rare ones are nice, the medium well ones are my all time favorite. They explode open like their harboring mini packs of dynamite and make for an exciting experience when you’re sitting right next to the coals. We chatted well into the night and thoroughly enjoyed ourselves. Life in Japan is an amazing adventure and I can’t wait to find out what happens next!

In the beginning...

Good evening all of you in the States and good morning to those of us on this side of the world,

It's the start of our third week in Japan and I've finally found the time to take note of the events of the last 14 days. I will chronicle the first week here...

*imagine the picture going all wiggly like in those cheesy movie flashbacks*

We arrived in Tokyo on Sunday, July 24th, after flying for 12 hours on Japan Airlines. It felt like a quick trip and I'm happy to report that I'm fully caught up on the year's chick flicks. We were ushered off the plane by people in bright pink JET t-shirts and onto awaiting buses. 

By the time we got through customs, sorted our luggage, rode the buses and arrived at the hotel, nearly four hours had elapsed from when we disembarked from the plane. We found our rooms, discovered we had the same roommates we had had in Denver and I crashed at 8:30. Corin, Evan (from Kansas and placed in south western Japan) and Thomas (from Boulder and placed about 40 minutes from Kushiro) went to dinner and then also called it a night. We awoke the next day for a breakfast of french fries and hard boiled eggs and prepared for orientation. We had been forewarned that Tokyo orientation was basically a waste of time, particularly for those of us in Hokkaido, but we attended the morning sessions just the same. Our interest had waned by lunch (pasta and marinara sauce on a lazy susan...the boys and I ventured out into the Tokyo heat and found a convenience store with sushi rolls). We may or may not have attended the next day and a half of orientation but I'll leave that for our discerning parents to decide. In the times when we were or were not in orientation, I accidentally ordered enough food for a starving family of four, had some interesting experiences in certain parts of Tokyo and Corin found his dream land in the Happy Potato, a vintage video game store. There was so much more to be had in Tokyo but we just simply ran out of time. By Wednesday morning, however, we were ready to get to our new home!

We left for Hokkaido on a domestic flight headed north, a few hours after we awoke on July 27th . The trip was a short hour and a half and we landed at the airport outside of Sapporo. My supervisor, Aki, and one of Corin's supervisor's, Ms. Hashimoto, were waiting for us at the terminal. We said good bye to Thomas who was headed by car to Akkeshi, grabbed a quick convenience store lunch and found our seats on the train bound for Kushiro. After an hour of talking and sharing pictures of home--the train ride from Sapporo to Kushiro is about 4 hours--I was car (train?) sick like I have never been before. For the next three hours I prayed the train would simply derail so I could get off. When I did happen to open my eyes, the view was incredible. Lush greenery on one side and the Pacific Ocean on the other. 

We arrived in Kushiro at 6:15 in the evening and I felt compelled to kiss the ground, or throw up on my kyoto-sensai (vice principle) who was part of the welcome party. Luckily, neither happened and we headed to dinner with Aki, my other supervisor, Mr. Sawano, Corin and my predecessor, Lucy. Sushi was on the menu and it was delicious. After a couple hours of conversation, we called it a night and settled into our haphazardly arranged apartment (think two twin beds facing the wrong direction in one room, a disconnected washing machine, three or four different shelving units and piles of boxes...plus three huge suitcases and two very exhausted Americans.

The next few days were spent going into the office and then running around, applying for our foreign identification cards (called geijin cards by most JETs), setting up bank accounts through the post office, attempting what turned into a total of five times to buy cell phones, getting all the rest of the bills figured out and rearranging the apartment to a more manageable design. That Friday night was spent getting to know the other ALTs in the area at Corin's predecessor Courtney and her boyfriend Joe's house. They were headed back to Australia and London, respectively, and needed to care of some remaining bottles (of water, clearly!). We also got to meet Chris (from Minnesota), Corey (from Hawaii) and Shey (from Colorado, but attended UW at the same time as Corin and I. WHAT?!), stage name Marian Spencer (a magician whose Japanese name I can't remember at the moment), and a super sweet JTE from one of Corin's schools. The night was a success. Unfortunately, Meiki has a very dedicated baseball team and we were woken up at 8 a.m. the next day by rowdy chanting and batting practice. The team must be the best in the country because they literally practice ten hours a day, every. single. day. Saturday was grocery shopping and relaxing day while Sunday involved a trip to the 100 Yen shoppe (best place ever!) with Courtney and Joe, plus watching Corin start and finish Harry Potter #7. Our first week in Japan was officially over. And we were exhausted.

The JET Academy Awards.

Well, the results are in and we’re going to 

*drum roll please*

 

KUSHIRO, HOKKAIDO, JAPAN.

And the best part is: we’re together.

Life is so good.