Settling In

I've been in Japan for almost a week and I got to feel my first earthquake for this trip already yesterday morning (last time I also got an earthquake). It was a magnitude 5.5 and a 3 on the JMA seismic intensity scale locally (in Wako-shi). It was startling to wake up to the room rattling and I might have punched daid in the face, but apparently he forgot this.

On the weekend, daid threw me a Welcome to Japan! party. In preparation for the party, we visited the local liquor store and found that they carry Chimay as well as a few good beers from Nagano (apparently this is where the good Japanese beer comes from). I'll still miss Canadian beers it seems, but at least there's an option that is more familiar than the local beers and also delicious.

We played Cards Against Humanity at the party which provided me with an opportunity to learn some interesting words in Japanese, but unfortunately I did not retain them.  Probably it's for the best, since I'd rather avoid stumbling around for a correct word in Japanese and come up with the one for boner when that's not what I want to discuss.

We're still settling into the new apartment. daid moved just before I got here and we're in the process of acquiring things like furniture and appliances. We finally figured out how to connect the washing machine to the tap today. It had some weird plastic thing sticking out and we couldn't snap the hose onto the tap properly. We'd been working under the assumption that we were missing a connecting piece until we went to Bic Camera and the guy just handed us the most expensive washing machine connector and tried demonstrating how to deal with it without being helpful at all. I think that he caught that we didn't understand and he might have actually thought we'd buy whatever he handed us, but we put it back and just went home to fiddle with it more and we got a proper explanation today so now it works.

The apartment is coming together and even though it's missing things like furniture or an internet connection, it's starting to feel a bit like home. I'm sure that once I have some drawers to put my clothes in instead of living out of my suitcase and get better at finding my way around here, that will only get better.