If anyone has ever wondered where I got my adventurous spirit, or my “no pain no gain” attitude, let me tell you: Continue reading »
Dec 262006
Dec 202006
Welcome to the Twilight Zone.
Having gotten used to living in a country where everything is crammed into impossibly small spaces, the sight of Costco Japan’s enormous Amagasaki warehouse was nothing less than a total mind trip. For years I’ve been hearing tales of this legendary expatriate haven – a place where one can purchase all of the products they grow to miss while living thousands of miles from home. This Sunday I joined Dylan and Heather for my first visit. I had my fingers crossed for a $20 tub of protein powder.
And although they carried little more than the same $60 bag of “half protein, half sugary-flavoring” that Japanese supermarkets are somehow able to market as “good for weightlifting,” the rest was just what I’d been hoping for. They had everything from lean ground beef (I bought several pounds) to sharp cheddar cheese (I bought several pounds) to microwavable lasagna (I bought several pounds). They had some of the best-tasting pizza and hot dogs I’ve ever had (what a weekend…hamburgers one day, pizza and hot dogs the next!) They even had economy-sized bottles of umeboshi, twelve-packs of azuki beans, and cans of matcha powder that say “Let’s enjoy the relaxing time.”
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Dec 192006
Man, where to begin with this weekend…
At this moment I’m writing you from an express train on the way to Amagasaki, the site of one of Japan’s four Costco megastores. And I’m drunk.
Wait. Actually, I should probably go back and start from the beginning.
On Saturday afternoon, after spending the better part of the day in Kyoto Central Library trying to figure out how to implement a multilingual Japanese/English interface for this site, I hopped on a train for Kobe to meet up with Dylan, Heather, Shivana, and a number of their JET friends. The group of us had two things in mind for the evening. The first was hamburgers.
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Dec 122006
As I’ve mentioned, these past weeks have been very very busy as I try to get my life here sorted out as thoroughly as possible. So let’s add in a bit more, shall we? My brand new laptop crashed (er, Windows did…surprise, surprise!) and forced me to spend four days of lunch-breaks reformatting and reinstalling. As soon as I got everything fixed up, I got sick…for the third time in two months. I don’t think I’ve ever been sick this many times in such a short period. Perhaps I’m pushing myself too hard? Perhaps my body isn’t used to winter actually being cold? Perhaps working until 7:00pm or later every day doesn’t leave me any room to breathe? 😛
But enough about that. Time to catch up on a month of no blog posts (in highly abbreviated form).
Starting off six weekends ago, I headed down to Takatsuki (a city conveniently located halfway between Kyoto and Osaka) to visit Yano and his wife at their new home. Yano is one of a handful of people who I never told about my plans to come back to Japan – instead, I intended on showing up one day out of the blue and completely surprising him. Unfortunately, his recent purchase of a new house meant that I’d be unlikely to find my way there on my own, so I eventually gave in and told him over the phone. That’s alright, he was still pretty shocked to find out that I was talking to him from 25 minutes away instead of 25 hours. And his wife nearly jumped out of her slippers when she came home from work to find me sitting in her livingroom watching TV 😉
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Dec 032006
So, I’m finally moved into my new apartment. Phew, that was just about the hardest thing I’ve ever have to do! In addition to the numerous challenges I discussed in an earlier post (lack of availability, lack of “conveniences,” quick turnarounds, anti-foreigner prejudice, etc) another thing came up that almost cost me two more good options. The issue of a guarantor.
To rent an apartment in Japan, you need someone to be a 保証人 – a guarantor whose name goes right on the lease with yours; if you damage the room, fail to pay rent, or skip town, they come after the guarantor for any money owed. Typically one’s parents act as their guarantor until they get married and buy a house, so for the Japanese it’s no particular problem, but for foreigners it’s just one more challenge to overcome while setting up a life in Japan. Thankfully, my employer has been kind enough to act as guarantor for many of his overseas employees. That is, if the particular mansion allows company guarantors (Note: the Japanese call nice apartments “mansions” and crappy ones “apartments”).
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