Rife In Japan So Far.

Ok, so getting to Japan was a real pain is the butt because I had to transfer a million times.  Finally, I met up with someone at the shinkansen (bullet train) station who takes me to my apartment by cab.  This is what I see.

The room is a 8 tatami mat room which is kinda roomy for a 1 room apartment in Japan. However, I am sure babies have larger rooms all to themselves in America.  Another up side to this room is that I have a stand for my futon, meaning that I don't have to sleep on the floor.  The room came fully furnished with a TV that's older than I am, a small table which I use as an ironing board, and a mirror.  I also forgot to mention that the room has a PS2 that I have yet to use because all the games are in Japanese.  The room also has a kitchen that has a refrigerator that comes up to my chest, a microwave, and a washing machine. The stove has only one burner so multitasking in the kitchen is impossible, meaning all the episodes of iron chef I watched were for nothing.  The bathroom is comparable to an airplane bathroom in size.  Also, I did not know that there was a water heater outside of the bathroom that I needed to turn on, meaning that for the first couple days I took showers that were colder than a yeti's asshole.

 I heard that right down the street from my house was supposed to be a grocery store and a 7-11.  I decided to head down and pick up supplies the next day and stumbled across this baby.

It says bicycle parking area.

I became fond of this bicycle riding penis so I decided to make this shop my haircut  place.  I asked for a haircut and the owner just looked at me confused out of his mind.  At first I thought that my Japanese skills were really shitty since I couldn't even ask for a haircut properly in Japanese.  Then I found out that the barber was just partially deaf, which I though was awesome. I mean, don't people who lose a sense usually make up for it in some awesome way? Like Stevie Wonder is blind but he sings like no other, and that guy with no hands can make sandwiches with his feet.  I thought that since the barber was deaf, he could cut hair like a pro.  It turned out to be a normal haircut experience.

As for work, I would post up pictures of my students but I think it would be really creepy if I just went around campus taking pictures of girls.  So instead, here is a picture of my office.

There were a lot of stuffed animals in the office that were given as gifts to the prior TA and left here.  The office is nice and all but the administration is kicking me out this week and moving me to a brand spanking office.  Chee.

 The next week I decided to go and visit Osaka since we had long weekend and meet up with friends I hadn't seen in years.  It was lots of fun catching up with the Japanese kids our seminar house successfully turned into alcoholics 2 years ago.  For old time's sake, we spent the whole weekend drinking and singing karaoke.  Since I was really drunk most of the time, I didn't take as many pictures as I should have.  Excuse me for making memories instead of trying to capture them.

DJ Chicocks

Masayo and Tomo-kun

I know its dorky, but I was really excited when I got my own stamp.  I had it custom made and it says "ratto" in Japanese, which sounds a lot like rat but actually should be my last name.  Now instead of signing documents, I just bust out my stamp and stamp the shit out of documents.

The next weekend was the sake festival.  Of all the festivals in Japan, I have never wanted to go to any as much as I did this one.  My alcoholic roommate from Oregon, who is also in Japan living with his girlfriend, came over for the weekend and we went to the festival together.  The weather was really bad but it didn't matter much once we got drunk.  The festival kinda works like Oktoberfest would, where you pay a 1800 yen or $20 entrance fee and get a little cup that you can use to get sake from all the stands which had samples of sake from all regions of Japan.  After the festival, 5 of us went to karaoke near the train station.  although, before we did that, we stopped by a convenient store and bought a few beers to sneak in.

The enclosure that the festival was in.

The group and some random Japanese people.

It was pretty crowded.

Puke.

Karaoke.

The sake cup.

Sam feeling it the next day.

The next day, Sam and I got up nice and early in the afternoon and went to check out the Peace Park.  We had heard rumors of a Mexican restaurant around that area so we went out in search for it, only to find that it was closed.  It was a really nice day though so it wasn't a complete waste.

Gembaku (A Bomb) Dome.

Uhh, some statue I forgot the name of.

There were paper cranes from a school in Australia on this statue.

Thousands and thousands of paper cranes at Sadako's statue.

We were told that the Mexican restaurant was south of the statue of the mother and her child.  This is one of the 6 statues we found depicting a mother and child.

These are some condoms we found in Japan.  If you know Japanese products then its funny. If not then you will think I am weird for posting this.

A few days later we tried ordering a pizza from Pizza Hut. We bought the largest pizza possible and the cost was 3200 yen which is well over $30.  The diameter of the pizza was only about the length of Sam's foot.  It was a sad but at least we had the N64 version of Mario Kart to balance out the sucky of that evening.

Well this pretty much sums up the first month of my life here in Japan.  Thanks for reading.

- Eddie