Between a Rock and a Wet Place

I will FIND where this draft is coming from if it takes me ALL WINTER!

In the meantime, I've bubble wrapped most of my windows. All I have to do now is the bathroom and the two spare rooms. My guest room has served as a very nice walk-in freezer this weekend. Too bad the mold room is the mold room, or I could have both a walk-in freezer and a walk-in refrigerator! Maybe next year I'll have that all sorted out so that I will.

So I had a nice weekend. Didn't end up leaving the apartment until Sunday afternoon, but I used my time well and have no regrets. I finally left on Sunday when the Nobori ladies called to see if I wanted to go skating at our local rink. At first I was like, "...but I have to outside to get there..." but then I realized I really ought to and it turned out being a great day. I'll definitely be going back on a regular basis from now on. It's good exercise and it's a lot of fun!

While we were at the rink, we had several kids on our tails the entire time. It was like a mine field trying to dodge them as they cut in front of me to get a better look. Finally, one of the little girls who knew one of my friends came up and heard us talking in English, which annoyed her because she doesn't speak it.

"Did you forget Japanese??" she asked my friend earnestly. We laughed and I introduced myself, followed by a few of those question you ask all children when you meet them (how old are you? what grade are you in?..etc).
To which she responds, "Wait, are you Japanese?"
"No way!" I say, "I'm an American."
"Really? You speak so well!

Isn't it amazing how, even though kids usually don't know what they're talking about, they can still make or break your day? Needless to say, my day was made.

After, we went to visit a friend in the hospital who had to have elbow surgery after she slipped on the ice from all the bad storms this year. Fun fact: all of our orthopedic wards in the city are full because of all the ice injuries :(

We got the gaijin together for some conveyor belt sushi at the end of the night, which was pretty darn pleasing, especially since we were starved. Downing buckets of tea and egg custard with the sushi finally warmed us up after a day of cold. If it had been Saturday, I would have thrown in some sake and made a real perfect meal of it.

Wow, today went by really quickly. I'm actually blogging from home instead of at work! I was really productive today though and I feel good about what I'm doing. Overall I've been a real baller, though lately I've been finding it a little hard to focus. My daydreams are getting too good. Which is fine, they give me inspiration, good ideas, and things to look forward to. I just have to be careful that I don't get too carried away and end up disappointing myself.

Though as far as my schedule goes, I'm starting to get nervous again. Just like last December, most of my free time is already spoken for in the next two months, and I still have a lot of commitments to plan. I like being busy - it makes the time go quickly - but it also makes me worry about what chaos will ensue if something goes wrong. Not to mention, usually there's money-spending involved. I've done a good job just living life without worrying, but it's getting to the point where I have to start thinking twice before acting.

But tonight I made curry and scones and did other wonderful things to advance my household. Some of the more rewarding things in life, to be sure :)

The Final Installment of the Apartment Chronicles.

The rest of the space is composed of many closets, the 3-rooms of tatami that all meet in the central living room, and a kitchen. In my opinion, tatami kind of smells like hamsters. This creates some weird feelings when walking through a city hall filled with tatami and wondering where the barn is. Mine in my apartment is older so it doesn’t smell quite so much as fresh stuff, but with tatami you have to be careful about getting it wet and bugs can live in it (I’m told you do NOT want to look under tatami because inevitably it has gotten wet and things ARE living under it!). It’s also a little impractical because you can’t wear shoes or put too heavy of things on it. It’s cute though, and not entirely uncomfortable.

The living room is wood squares, as is the kitchen. One of the rooms is my bedroom, which has room only for a bed and some plastic storage bins. Another room is the “office,” and the last room wasn’t used by the Pred, so right now I set up the western style dining table (though I don’t use it) and on occasion I hang my laundry to dry in there. Most people use it as a drying room, from what I hear. The ALT next door took all the doors off all the rooms, seeing as they’re just sliding screen style Japanese doors (you can’t see through them, they’re made of what looks to be white plastic tablecloth lol) and it really opens up the layout. I think my plan is to take the doors off the office and make an omega-room. Then maybe I can use those doors to cover the big old hole in the wall.

I think the mold is subsiding in the other room based on my efforts, though all the same, the wall is visually ruined. The Pred thought the only way to fix the mold issue was to put a couch against it. Admittedly, it eased the smell a little, but also ruined the couch, maintained the smell, and was, oh, a health hazard? My solution was coat after coat of bleach. I win.

Anyway. It’s annoying because all the lights are cord-pull lamps in the middle of the room hanging from the ceiling. I’m getting used to it, but you have to click them a few times to get fully on and fully off, and they don’t always turn on when you pull them. There’s a Japanese style floor table in the living room, along with a tiny tv and a gas heater whose pipe runs across the room and over the doors. Anyone taller than me would be quite pissed off constantly at the lowness of the pipes. I barely brush them if I’m not careful. There’s a washer and drier in my living room, but apparently that’s where they’re kept in every apartment in Japan. My drier is broken, so it’s pretty much just a storage shelf and an eyesore. The walls in all the rooms are ugly and ruined and stained. I thought about re-wallpapering or painting, since I pay almost nothing, but it seems silly to invest in an apartment. Still, it would make it smell better and be more comfortable, so maybe I’ll check prices. I moved a low couch into the living room when I found it stowed away in a closet (huh??), though really it’s like a foam loveseat. Still, it’s cute, and it’s a little more comfortable than the floor chairs we’ve got. I have other options, but I kind of like keeping it a little Japanese.

The kitchen is a little disappointing. It’ll be livable when I finish cleaning it, but there’s little storage space, the kitchen faucet is too high and always splashes, the surfaces are cheap and hard to clean, I don’t have an oven, my workspace is the plastic top of a plastic dresser that is ¼ the size of my desk at work. The range always makes a mess and there’s so much grease from The Pred that I’m sure it’ll take me all year to get it maintainable even if I scrub at it a little more every time I clean.

There’s also a little storage place across the way for my bicycle and yard stuff. If I had more stuff, I would fill it because it’s quite large, but as is, my closets are mostly fully of junk and air because I own so little. WELL, I do own a few boxes full of broken clocks, it seems no one who lived here before knew how to throw them away in the Japanese garbage system lol.

Weather wise, it’s so cool here that even though there’s not any kind of air control, all I have to do is open the windows and I get a great ocean breeze, no matter how hot the day. Winter will be another story, I’m afraid, since everything is thin and un-insulated (what the heck, this is Hokkaido, what were these contractors thinking??) I’ve been told already that I’ll spend a crap ton on kerosene and still probably only heat one room. The apartment is very moist, since our climate is moist and there’s little ventilation, but the heater will dry things out in winter and in the summer I can have the windows open. The only crappy time is days like today, where it’s been raining for days straight and nothing really ever gets dry.

I’m looking into getting a dehumidifier for a few hundred dollars, since everyone hangs their laundry here, the primary selling factor of dehumidifiers are how quickly they’ll dry your laundry in the same room, not how they’ll keep your basement dry. It’s really interesting to see the labels list all the clothes the dehumidifier can dry at once in under an hour, instead of cubic feet of drying capacity. It’s expensive, but for half the year I’ll be desperate for it. Still, my apartment is the same price for a year as my apartment at school was for a month, and it’s very, very conveniently located, which is more than I can say for the apartments of almost anyone else I know. On foot, it’s 15 minutes from school and the ocean, 15 minutes from major shopping and the bus terminal, and 5 minutes from one of the biggest train stations in the area.

In summation, my apartment is old but I’m creative, and yesterday I bought 2 bottles of Japanese febreeze, some scented oil, and some dehumidifiers.

LET’S DO THIS!

The entry you’ve all been waiting for: my cute stinky apartment – the basics.

I live on the first floor and there are three other apartments in my unit, but there’s another unit attached on the side and maybe 5 or 6 sets of units more next to ours. Technically I should have gone around and introduced myself to my neighbors and brought them little presents (in Japan, you don’t receive housewarming presents, you give “please-welcome-me-to-the-neighborhood” presents) but I’ve been pretty busy and tired so that’s fallen down the priority list. I know the woman upstairs because she was good friends with my predecessor and another ALT is in the unit next door. It’s teacher housing, so everyone who lives here is a teacher of a family member of a teacher. The system makes sense, because the education system is very dynamic and teachers move schools as often as every 3 years.

When I first arrived, K-sen made a big show about feeling sorry for me having to live there. He opted to find his own housing, 1) because the teacher apartments suck and are old, and 2) because he didn’t want to be surrounded by co-workers. He must like his privacy, (a way in which we are alike) because he’s mentioned the pains of having to live near co-workers more than once. It’s funny though, I kind of thought all the teachers from my high school lived somewhere else because I never saw them. In fact, I rarely ever saw anyone.

Until the other night when I happened to run some errands after work, then I saw about 3-4 of them in a half an hour, and found out they’re all living in the unit next door. This makes me a little uneasy, I had no idea they were so close! Now I’m worried I’ve been playing music too loud or using the wrong drying racks in the yard. The teachers I saw are good people, but again, privacy is an issue. Fortunately I’m on a slightly different schedule because I don’t *have* to work as long of hours as they do (though I’m trying to because I want to be treated like a normal teacher as much as possible).

As I may have mentioned *cough* the apartment has an aroma. Usually it just smells like old, like the unfinished wood that makes up 70 percent of surfaces and the finished wood that makes up the rest, has absorbed every musty odor in the last god-knows-how-many years. Being that my predecessor was a little on the inhuman side when it came to cleanliness, I’m sure it’s made it all the more worse. There’s also a big 2’ x 1’ corner of black mold in the side room, a chunk missing from the wall in another side room, and a large musty closet in every room that will never stop stinking. The closet thing is weird, because floors are cement, the walls are thin wood, and there’s almost nothing in them. What could be making/retaining the stench?? Anyway, my biggest issue is that the pipes smell like sewage, which I think is a my-apartment-problem, not a Japan problem. I haven’t noticed any plumbing issues here outside of my domicile. Another big problem is that the kerosene tank is in the genkan (the traditional Japanese entry to the home). I have only one outside door, and so whenever someone enters the apartment, they smell a gas station.

But that important thing to remember is that, in spite of all this, it’s dramatically inexpensive. I know some people paying $500 or more, but they live in considerably nicer digs and usually in bigger cities.

I pay $60 per month lol