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.