The Apartment Search

After two days at the hotel (Kanazawa International Hotel) we went to stay with Doreen and Bruce until we were in an apartment. In the move from the hotel to Doreen's condo, we learned that the original apartment we fell in love with was not going to be ours. It was through a different real estate agent than the school usually uses, and they required basically the deed to the school as collateral for us moving in. Obviously that was not going to happen. More apartment shopping was in order.

We viewed the final six apartments in our general distance from school, size, and price range, and didn't quite like any of them. The best was a townhouse with three bedrooms in the upper level, scary stairs that were very steep and had no handrail, and a couple of real problem areas. The craftsmanship was lovely, and there was a skylight in the upstairs hallway giving a lot of natural lighting. There was also a decent view of the mountains from the upstairs. There was also a gaping view of the street through the living room windows. The living room itself was not very good, as it had the main entrance, stairway, and toilet along one wall. Another wall had closets under the stairs. The third wall was the lovely street view, and the fourth was the kitchen/dining room area, so it had no good places for furniture against the walls. Also, the washroom (separate from the toilets in Japanese houses) was through the kitchen. Which means, every morning, you have to walk down the scary stairs half awake, through the living room where everyone can see in, and through the dining room/kitchen to take a shower. You also have to walk down the scary stairs if you need to use the toilet at 3 am. Somehow I think broken bones might be part of my Japan experience if I had to use those stairs that often.

We told them we'd like to see a couple more, and our real estate agent had no more for us to view. Mamoru, an English teacher who's been helping us out a lot, called around and found another place for us to view. This apartment was definitely older and had some questionable aspects, like the plastic molding on the top of the walls and multiple holes in one of the rooms from hanging things, but has a good layout and an excellent view of the mountains. It's also a second floor (of two) apartment, so we'd look down on the street instead of the street looking into our living room. It has a huge living room/dining room/kitchen open room, a balcony and a sun room (walled in balcony) and two tatami rooms.

Almost all apartments have balconies, as clothes dryers aren't really around in Japan. They have a washer, and then hang everything out on the balcony or in the sun room for it to dry. Some machines are now combination washer/dryers, which is something we're thinking of getting, but many people still just hang their clothes out or use the coin laundries, where there are dryers.

Tatami rooms are traditional Japanese rooms where the floors are covered in tatami mats instead of laminate floors. They don't carpet whole rooms here, the floors are pretty much tatami or wood laminate. In a tatami room, you want to sleep on a futon, a mat you unfold in the evening to sleep on, roll back up in the morning, and keep in a special closet. We slept on one of these at Doreen's and it's actually really warm. The mat and tatami keep the heat in wonderfully. In fact, if you don't roll up the futon, mold begins to grow on the tatami.

We decided to go with the apartment instead of the townhouse, because although Lee like the workmanship of the townhouse a lot more than the quality through the apartment, the layout and view were much better with the apartment. It's also bigger and slightly cheaper. The only real problem with this one is that it has a huge initial payment, so large pieces of furniture will have to wait unil a later date, like when we get reimbursed or our first paycheck.

School

After lunch, we went to visit KTC, the school that Ana's working at. We were ushered in to visit the President of the school very much unexpectedly, and so didn't have the expected present for him. During the meeting, he mentioned the fact that I am the first female engineering teacher here. Ever. So not only am I representing America, but I am representing all of female kind as engineers here. My brain kind of shut down at that point.

The high school here has a bit more of a college format. There's seven periods in a day, fifty minutes per period, and a half hour lunch break. Engineering classes tend to be more than one period long, but only one day per week. I'm in class in the machine shop five days per week, but a different year level per day. I also can't wear a skirt to work, unless I want to change for class, since I'm in the machine shop. The only girl in Mechanical Engineering in the school is a third year student, so she has to run and change from her uniform skirt to pants between classes when she has shop class. The school has five different year levels in it, going from about sophomore year in high school to second year in college. The first through third year students are required to wear uniforms, but the fourth and fifth year students can wear whatever they want.

Each class starts with a greeting where the students stand and then bow to the teacher. It's kind of weird. Most classes end this way too, except for shop classes where the students are allowed to just go off once they've cleaned their areas. They're also meticulously clean about their machine shop - students put everything back the way it was, taking vises off of the mills and turning off power to the machines. Another odd thing - they only have two holes in their paper, not three. Their folders and binders are made for two holes and their punches have only two holes. Weird. Apparently it's that way in New Zealand also, as I learned from the other English speaking ME professor.

I currently have almost nothing to do, as I have no computer, no classes to prepare for, and no other projects or anything going on. I suppose on Monday I'll have students' posters to work on. I'll be helping them to translate them into English. They'll be giving me rough drafts and I'll be helping them with grammar and vocabulary. I've been using my non-class time to study Japanese and get to know the building. I've also been helping Jamie use Inventor. He got the Japanese version, since if he takes on teaching it, that's what it will be, and hadn't ever used it before. Since I have used it in the past, I've been helping him find things. I can't understand it either, but the commands are all in the same places in the drop-down menus, so I can kind of figure it out. A little.

My classes mostly involve walking around the machine shop, looking at students' projects and speaking to them in English about their techniques/projects/anything else that comes up. My role is to get them to hear English words, especially engineering terms, so they can interact with English engineers in the future. This is why there's minimal prep - I'm supposed to just speak with them about projects they're already in the middle of, not actually lecture or teach anything. Yet.

I also was supposed to get a uniform, since they all have uniforms for the machine shop. The students get jackets to wear over their shirts, and the faculty get shirts and pants. The shirts have pockets for pens on the arms. I will feel like such a nerd wearing them. Though I suppose that since I'm in Japan and teaching Engineering, I probably am one. I'm going to say that the evidence is not yet conclusive and keep on believing I'm not. Anyway, I won't be getting a uniform quite yet as the uniform guys didn't realize that I'm a female, so they only brought male uniforms. I'm not even sure if they'll stock a size for me in female sizes. Doreen, who's been a major help to us here, is much smaller than I and can't generally get clothes here. We'll see next week.

Lunch

After finishing with the real estate agent, we headed out for Japanese "pizza". I put that in quotations because this is definitely nothing like American pizza. There's not even dough. It's more like a fritter or a hash brown cake or something. We sat down at a table with an oven in the middle of it. In Japanese quick-service sit down restaurants, they don't come to see if you need anything, they bring you drinks and then wait for you to press a button to tell them that you're ready to order. I like that - if you need them, you press the button, otherwise, they don't bug you except every so often to refill your water. We sit down to peruse the menu. The choices are pork, beef, shrimp, scallops, squid, octopus, and a couple others I just don't remember. Lee and Mieko ordered the squid, I got shrimp. They bring you bowls of sliced up cabbage with some flour, green onions, red ginger, your selected filling, and an egg on top. The egg is just an egg - freshly cracked open with the yolk not even broken. You get to stir up the ingredients and cook them on the table yourself.


They have an hourglass that you flip, and it takes, I think, 6 minutes per side to cook. There's dried tuna stuff that you can put onto it to really make it fishy. I put only a little bit on. It's the brown bits on top in the next picture.


You then get to flip it over (in my case, it took a couple of attempts and then I had to repair some bits). Then you flip the hourglass again and let it cook on the other side. After that side is done, you flip it back over and turn off the table. There's a hoisin-style sauce and mayonnaise to put on the finished item, along with some seaweed based seasonings to sprinkle on. I only took a bit of the hoisin-style sauce for mine.


You have two implements to eat and cook this with, chopsticks (okay, so technically three) and a metal spatula-thingie. It has a sharp edge so you can cut the fritter into chopstick-able pieces, and it's also for flipping. This was actually really good. I like stir-fry that uses hoisin sauce, cabbage, and shrimp, so this was just that in a slightly different format. Okay, so maybe really different format, with the eggs and flour and all, but I enjoyed it. Lee liked it as well, and is quite pleased that his first meal out in Japan was squid "pizza".

Since we were there for lunch, we got our choice of dessert-type items: tea or coffee, or mango ice cream. Lee and I went for the ice cream. It was a very small scoop of ice cream with a spoon that was about as big as my index finger. Apparently the Japanese like little silverware. It matches the portion sizes here. The ice cream:


Mmmm, delicious!

In Japan

We made it to Japan. 16 hours in the plane, almost no turbulence, and some really, really cool views of Alaskan mountains. The first flight from Manchester, NH got us to Chicago, IL about a half hour early, so we got to hang out at the airport forever. The security people were confused about the massive number of knitting needles in my carry-on. They took out the case, opened it up, put it through the machine, opened it up again, put it back through the machine, and made sure that everything in there was for knitting and not other nefarious purposes. The X-ray lady thought she saw an arrow or something in there, but it was just my small crochet hooks. For the Chicago to Tokyo flight, we were on the Japan Airlines 747 over to the right. We sat on the upper level - you can see the windows above the walkway to get on the plane. I'm sure there's a technical name for it, but it escapes me at the moment. They fed us twice on the plane, and gave us a few snacks. Some of the food was rather weird, but it was better than I was expecting. There were a couple of vegetables in the salad and soup that were not anything either of us had ever had before.

We made it to the Komatsu (city next to Kanazawa) airport on time, got our bags, and had a nice welcoming committee of three of the KTC staff, two English teachers and the Secretary General, who looks like he's 28 but his oldest child is our age. They took us to the hotel and got us checked in. The people there were very nice. The bellhop took our bags and turned on all the lights in our room, no tipping allowed. The room had pajamas on the beds for us and a really, really odd shower setup. In Japanese washrooms, you're supposed to wash outside of the bathtub and just soak in the tub itself. Therefore, all the floors of the shower room have drains in them and the shower attachment is on the wall outside of the tub. The plus side is that the tubs are deep enough to soak in completely. I didn't think to take pictures of the bathroom. The other thing that amused us was that the toilets all have a lot of buttons. There's three buttons for the bidet, at least two buttons to flush, and some other ones that probably control the heated seat. Maybe they wiped for you - since they were in Japanese, I didn't want to start playing with them to find out.

The hotel had a buffet breakfast, complete with omelettes, bacon, eggs, cereal, salad, soup, rice, salmon, and multiple types of croissants and rolls. Not exactly your average American breakfast buffet, but good nonetheless. Also, the cereal tastes like Fruity Pebbles if you have a Citrus Blend Halls cough drop just before eating. There's also a great view of the city from the hotel. The first morning, we went with Mieko, our translator/guide/very important person/Japanese parent, to look for apartments. We saw five, three two bedroom, kitchen/living room/dining room apartments, and two four bedroom kitchen/dining room apartments, which were really three bedroom places since you'd be using one room as the living room. We fell in love with one of the 4DKs; it had a great layout, beautiful doors between the living room and kitchen/dining room, a balcony on either side of the apartment that you could get to though all three of the bedrooms and the living room, and it was only about $2500 in initial costs. Apartments here in Japan are very expensive. You need to pay the first month's rent, one to three months' rent as a security deposit, about a month's rent to the real estate agent, and then one to four months' rent in thank you money to the landlord. We would need to buy all kinds of things to furnish it - a fridge, a stovetop, even lights for the ceiling attachments. We figured, hey, this is such an awesome apartment with such a low initial cost (the last teachers paid $3000 and $5000) that it was definitely worth it. It was also over 70 square meters, so we had enough space. So we started the process, and headed out for lunch.