Our Apartment…the outside

The front door to our building:

Front door to our apartment building.

Our apartment building is the yellow one. Our apartment is on the left, ground floor (there’s only 4 apartments in the whole building).

hello yellow house!

Our Apartment in Japan

Our apato is large by Japanese standards, and only 2 years old (10 years old is considered VERY old and ready to knock down. The building standards aren’t very high – houses go up in about 2 weeks and look like cardboard cutouts stuck together. Insulation is a plastic sheet between the inner wall and the outer wall. They aren’t built to last.)

So here’s our apartment:

The toilet, with heated seat, bidet function and faucet above the cistern for saving water.

The kitchen gas top, bench, fridge and the best purchase ever, the convection microwave.

The living room with TV, coffee table, carpet rug and sofa bed.

The living and dining, looking from the kitchen servery.

Our bedroom with futon and built-ins. Our futon is folded up and stored in the cupboard during the day.

Our dining table.

Inside the bathroom – mirror, hand-held shower, bath with auto fill function.

Through the door is the bath and shower. In this room is our cow bath mat, towels and to the right, the basin and washing machine.

Our entry hallway. At the end to the right is our front door. The cupboard contains our shoes and slippers and a bright yellow umbrella in case of rain. We take our shoes off in the foyer and only wear slippers inside the house.

If you remember, here are the photos from before we moved in. Toshy took these photos before we knew we would definitely be living here.

Week 4 Highlights

Tuesday: Our dining table was delivered in the morning, along with a rug for under Benno’s office desk. No more cardboard box dining table! That pretty much completes our furniture requirements. We also collected our Alien Registration cards from the City Hall office. Dinner was mushroom stroganoff and chocolate pudding.

When we were in Tokyo we found a Studio Ghibli etc merchandise shop in Akihabara. Jiji from Kiki’s Delivery Service now adorns my school bag. So cute!

Wednesday: We paid our first electricity bill at the convenience store, paid our rent, posted a parcel at the Post Office. All of my classes sat their first science topic tests this week. Dinner was roast vegetables and gravy.

Saturday: After traditional breakfast of pancakes we had the last lot of our large furniture delivered – washing machine, TV, TV stand. One of the delivery guys had about 5 earrings (that’s the most piercings we’ve seen). As for tattoos, the only one we’ve seen has been on the cook/owner/waitress from Non in Meguro, Toyko.

The weather is really warming up – sunny t-shirt temperature now. I baked apricot and coconut cookies and double choc chip cookies today – some with IKEA raspberry jam centres. Yum! Dinner was potato and chickpea curry with zensai for dessert. Zensai is a recently discovered dessert – adzuki bean soup with mochi (sticky rice).

yum! Apricot and Coconut Cookies and Double Choc Chip Cookies made to celebrate Golden Week holidays.

We discovered the ‘dim light’ setting on our lights. Click on, off, on, off and on again and instead of coming on bright, the light comes on a dim yellow. Strange, and a bit of a serendipitous discovery.

We might be living here…

While not confirmed yet, this might be our apartment for our time in Kisarazu! Whee!