Week 2

It's interesting how "your stuff" helps make a place more like home....your bed, your pictures, your dishes. I was having a conversation with one of the other expats, who said that when he moved here he found out one day the sea shipment company had lost his stuff. He said he was nearly driven to tears given the stress of the move and because he just wanted "his stuff".... I think it also had to do with the fact that he had been wearing the same suit for over a week.

Anyway, "our stuff" came yesterday afternoon in the surface shipment. So now I have a place to sit, more than one cup, fork, knife, plate. This means I can make my coffee at the SAME TIME I make my egg in the morning. Progress is amazing.

The Japanese are extremely punctual...so I was a little bit surprised when the movers were 20 minutes late (i.e. 9:00am means they will be standing there with their finger over the door buzzer at 8:59 and 59 seconds waiting to push it when the time is right). Turns out that our street was too small for the big moving truck and the movers were forced to move things into a smaller vehicle before driving down my street - definitely what my boss calls a "welcome to Japan moment".

Anyway, long story short, a crew of over 6 people show up wearing full body, white jump-suits, gloves and hats (mind you it's 85 degrees outside) and move all of my stuff inside. Getting my stuff made me very happy...

and my the apartment very messy. It looked like a paper-bomb exploded in my apartment. The move coordinator, in his limited English, even commented that I "moved a few things with my paper". Guess I'm happy nothing broke. You can see more of the move-in casualties here.

For the past couple of weeks I've been eating a lot of pre-packaged meals. One good thing is that there's a pretty decent selection of pre-packaged goods, like salads, sushi, noodles, etc. I like to think that I had gotten pretty creative with my instant noodle-making. Putting things like frozen vegetables in, extra pieces of sea-weed, egg...things that turned a simple meal into gourmet.

After two weeks of these meals, I was getting a little bit sick of eating the same thing every night. Now that I have knives, cutting boards, and a pan that's bigger than a tuna can, I'm able to make home-made meals.

For my first act, I decided to go and buy some vegetables at the local grocery store. A few thousand Yen and 30 minutes later, I had my first home-cooked meal in Japan.


Anyway - that's week two in a nutshell. This weekend is a canyoning trip that is sponsored by the firm...not sure why they would pay for their employees to jump off of cliffs and go down natural water water-slides....But hey, it's free, and it sounds fun.