Adventures in Japan

Moving, et cetera, et cetera

Well, it certainly has been a busy couple of days. On Monday we moved into the Orange House and since then we’ve been doing a lot of shopping and cleaning. I suppose I could have stopped to write a thing or two for the people back home, but apparently I didn’t. Here are a few things that made an impression over the last few days:

We ate real ramen noodles from a real ramen shop right across from our hotel. It was far superior to instant noodles. More like spaghetti. But in soup. This particular soup bore a striking resemblance to carbonara sauce. But soupier. Number one. The music in there was old school, too. I dug it.

After the ramen, we went wandering. We found Osaka’s "Pokemon Center" which is a clever Japanese way of saying "store that sells nothing but Pokemon stuff". It was absolutely packed! The crowd spilled out into the plaza, where kids could have their picture taken with a giant Pikachu. Interestingly enough, most of the pictures were taken with mobile phones, not cameras.

From there we meandered our way over to the Umeda Sky Building. It's got a "floating garden" on top and a old-style Japanese street in the basement, but today the big attraction was an international beer festival of some sort. It was outside in the courtyard between two towers, but we could hardly see through all the smoke. It wasn't from cigarettes; it was the grill smoke from all the food stalls. Yummy! But expensive. We hung around people watching for most of the afternoon. I don't remember seeing a single cool white guy. They were all pale, dorky, and quite a few were fat. Same goes for the women. I found that interesting. Also of note, the tequila-flavoured beer we bought. I thought it tasted more like lime than anything else, but it was definitely tasty and went down very smooth. If they weren't ¥500 per bottle, we probably would have bought more.

Monday was the big move. We thought it best to make two trips, what with all our luggage and the somewhat crowded conditions on the subway. We thought right, but hauling our stuff took the better part of the afternoon. It would have taken the better part of the morning, but we spent a lot of the morning trying to find an ATM that wouldn't reject our crazy North American credit cards so we'd have some cash to pay our first month's rent & such. We ended up cashing a couple of travellers cheques, which was no mean feat, what with Monday being Health and Sports Day. That's a national holiday over here. Oh yeah, happy Thanksgiving everybody.

So eventually we got all our stuff over to the Orange House (which I guess is named after the fruit, because it has nothing to do with the colour). Luckily for us, some rooms had opened up on the second floor. The room we got is in much better shape than the one we looked at last week. Still needed a good cleaning, but much less dingy. Plus it's got a combination oven/toaster/microwave AND a toaster oven. I think we're going to like it here.

So after we unceremoniously dumped all our stuff in our room. (Make no mistake. It is just a room.) We set out to find a ¥100 shop to get some household goods, most importantly, cleaning supplies. The crosswalks in this neighbourhood play a little electronic song when it's safe to proceed. I don't really recognize the tune, but I've already heard it enough times that I'll probably never forget it. The other thing I wonder about, is what's up with all the big bottles of water the folks around here have sitting on their front steps, or in their flowerbeds, or lined up under their windows. I assume it has something to do with superstition, or religion, or maybe they're just for watering plants. I may never know.

That night we slept with the window open because we're too cheap to run the air conditioner. It was still really hot in our room, and we were eaten alive by mosquitos. Happily, the weather is cooling off a bit now and we're sleeping better. Plus, we get to wear all the pretty new fall/winter clothes we bought before we left Canada. Hooray for new clothes! And hooray for bad English on T-shirts! I'd intended to buy a few to wear and keep as souvenirs, but it seems I'm spoiled for choice. We passed a few clothing stores while we were shopping for other things and nearly all the English we saw was either incorrect or just plain odd. Often both. I don't know how I'll ever decide on just one (or two, or three).

Once we got the "apato" all clean and mostly kitted out, it was time to buy groceries. But first, a trip to the local ward office to apply for our Alien Registration cards. There were a few complications, but overall it was not the ordeal I was expecting. We should have our cards within three weeks. Then we can go about the important business of buying a phone, and other good stuff like that. There sure are a lot of mobile phones over here, and a lot of mobile phone plans. I spent a lot of today looking them all up on ye olde internette and I'm feeling a little overwhelmed. I think what we'll end up doing is wandering around Den Den Town until we see a phone we like, then take whatever plan that gets us. Hopefully it won't cost us an arm and a leg. Well, maybe we won't be quite so haphazard about it, but right now, at this very moment, it doesn't sound like such a bad idea.

But anyway, back to the groceries. We'd been in the store a few times before, mostly looking for cleaning stuff, but this was the first time we entered in search of food. Most things did seem awfully expensive, but it's got to be cheaper than eating out all the time. We couldn't identify most of the vegetables, but we bought a mysterious leafy green one. It kinda smelled like broccoli when we cooked it, so it's probably good for us. We wandered up and down the aisles for about an hour, throwing this and that into our baskets, trying not to buy too many intriguing snacks (it was hard). We found most of what we were looking for without too much trouble. Loaves of bread are tiny and expensive, and cheese seems to be hard to come by, but we were delighted to discover that the Japanese aren't above marking down prices at the end of the day. At this particular supermarket, it seems they do it around 7:00. Good to know.

And right now Sean, Orange House’s only resident 5-year-old, is hanging over my shoulder and trying to use my touchpad. He’s also asking about what DVDs I like, and if I have a child in my stomach, so I guess I’d better go.