Hey guys, time to give you a little update while I have a chance. I don't have internet in my room yet, so the only time I can really check the web is at work. So yep, you guessed right - that means that I'm sitting here in the office on a Sunday morning. Woo.
My office is really laid back, which is good, and my boss is pretty cool from what I can gather. He likes to be called "boss", in English no less. Then there's the guy above him (who likes to be called "big boss"), who will talk your ear off if you give him an opening. The guy that's showing me around town warned me about it, but basically you should expect to be talking for a good half hour if you ask him a question. So that brings us to Hariu, the guy that shows me around. He rules. I had a cell phone the first day we went out and a bank account set up the next. Internet's on the way, and they want me to have a car like yesterday. In the meantime, this guy drives me around everywhere I need to go - we were in the office for maybe an hour over the course of the first 2 days.
On to the apartment: it's old, but big and free. Climbing up to the 5th floor is a workout, and I have never seen as many spiders as there are in the staircase leading up to my place. And just to add to the ambiance, there's this swampish area off to the side with all these frogs which sing me to sleep. They keep my neighbor Joe up, but luckily I sleep as heavily as my mom does so I don't have that problem. I have a feeling a frog could hop on my face and start croaking in my ear and I probably wouldn't notice... especially the way I've been sleeping lately. I still haven't slept past like 6 or 7, which if you know anything about my sleeping habits is quite peculiar. I don't think I've stayed up past midnight yet either and crash pretty hard at the end of each night. I'm not sure if it's jetlag, or if I'm just mentally exhausted from speaking Japanese all day long.
And the surroundings: the beach is awesome, although dirty as hell. We went out there last night to hang out and there were a few groups of people out with fireworks, shooting them off indiscriminately in every direction. The roads are all windy and narrow, so driving looks fun. Riding around in Joe's little Suzuki Alto is a trip - we've gone out and gotten lost in town twice already. Every time we venture out is like a little adventure. Where are we gonna wind up next - who knows? It took us about half and hour to find this train station on the other side of town picking up this one girl from a couple towns over. She's a Chinese Jewish American... yeah. We all met up yesterday, basically to revel in our mutual westernness. Whether you speak Japanese or not, at least for now at the end of the day I'm soooo ready to speak English to anyone who can understand me. 8 hours straight of nihongo is seriously fatiguing to me, so I can only imagine what it must be like for the people who came here not knowing more than a few words like my neighbor did. I'm sure I'll get into a groove in a couple weeks here and start forgetting English again in no time though.
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