Month One Thoughts

We are now four days into living in our new apartment. Everything is on the same floor–thank God–so I don't have to trek up and down stairs in the middle of the night to get to the bathroom. It's spare at the moment, with two air mattresses on the floor and an Ikea folding chair-and-table set until the first round of furniture is delivered this coming Tuesday. But we have AC, heat, a washer, and a fridge.

The washer and the fridge came from a "recycle store" for used items. It was so jammed full of appliances that we had to shed our backpacks and contort our way through the store. It is run by a couple of elderly gentlemen who we were able to communicate with using broken bits of each others' language and Google Translate when that failed. The washer and fridge were both very good brands in excellent condition. Purchasing them and same day delivery cost us about $400 total. My head exploded.

One of the two elderly gentlemen chased us down the street when he realized he hadn't gotten our address properly. He then proceeded to deliver the very heavy items with no assistance. He was very concerned about whether the washing machine would work properly and made us promise to return and tell him once we had tested it out for a few days. Needless to say, this is only one snapshot of the customer service in Japan.

Sergey and I are working through where our clothes go, negotiating shared spaces and shuffling many things around into storage in other rooms. We are slowly collecting useful things from Yodobashi Camera–the big box store–and Ikea and Life–our local grocery/health items/home goods store–and 100 Yen stores. There will still be no home cooking for a while, but at least we can store a couple days of food and snacks again.

We have no home internet beyond phone tethering until Thursday, so we found a cafe that is open until 10pm--no small feat. Excepting the bars and grocery stores, much of Tokyo rolls up its carpets around 5 or 6pm.

I woke up at 4:30am today and knew I was sick. My throat was sore and I was congested. Plus I was hungry. There was a 7/11 up the street that I'd already marked as my first stop if I ever felt like a midnight munchie, and so I went. I bought a sandwich, two onigiri, some kleenex and some disinfectant for scrapes, then walked home to eat my haul and make some tea.

Why does this matter enough to point out?

I grew up in Los Angeles and I've lived for several years in Seattle and Houston. Tokyo is as dense a city as any of them, and never have I felt as safe in a city as I do in Tokyo. In no other city would I dream of taking a midnight walk alone to a 7/11. Drive? Probably. But walk? Never.

Here it's different. Here, the streets are clean. The graffiti is minimal (and largely in English, unfortunately). I pass rows and rows of bikes with no bike locks on them. Children from elementary-school age and up roam the sidewalks and subways by themselves.

They clearly feel safe enough to leave their bikes unlocked and let their children travel alone. In living here, I can share in that safety.

I woke up this morning, still sick. I opted to collect some ready-made food from the market and stay at home, resting while Sergey went off to walk in the park and browse a few shops for more useful things.

Has it been a month already?

Every day has felt overfull, crampacked with subway trips crisscrossing the city to return with new information, further goals achieved, or shopping bags full of necessities. I wonder how long my shoes will last, with me walking several hours a day. Even these first four days in the apartment were so densely filled I barely had time to feel exhaustion before tipping over onto the mattress at night.

We laugh at our foibles (finding out only on the third day that the air mattresses have a one-way valve, or realizing we could have turned on the heater on the first day but didn't) and celebrate our victories (saving well over $1200 on the fridge and washer, figuring out new appliance workings when all the buttons and manuals are in Japanese). There are moments of friction when things go wrong (Apple Pay fritzed over our edge-case credit card usage, the days when I'm not feeling well physically or emotionally) but we sort it out quickly together.

One very full month, and it is still good. I'm building up a list of late-night coffeeshops and eateries and compiling lists of useful how-to Youtube videos. We look forward to assembling basic furniture and enrolling in language school.

いいです.

iidesu.

It's good.