More stuff for the apartment.

For a while, we only had a microwave and rice cooker for cooking things at home because apartments in Japan do not come with stove tops or ovens or anything like this. This lead to discoveries like how to make hot cakes in rice cookers and how to hydrate chick peas in these devices (yeah, it actually works), but it was somewhat limited for day-to-day cooking.

In late December, we got an induction burner, which was a good start, but it meant that we could only cook one thing at a time so last week, we finally got around to getting a new burner (we went with gas for the second one) and now we have a proper kitchen set up.

You never fully realize the joys of having two
burners until you try to make spaghetti.

We also finally got some more bowls and plates as well as a few forks (so we don't have to eat spaghetti out of bowls using chopsticks), some glasses (so we don't have to drink beer out of ceramic mugs) and some assorted things for the house.

Many of these recent acquisitions were spurred by our discovery of a 100 yen store in town which is apparently part of a giant chain of 100 yen stores in Japan. The 100 yen store here seems to be better than dollar stores back in Canada because it has much more variety (e.g. they had curtains) and the quality seems to be better.

While we were definitely getting by with what we had before and it's good to know that we don't really need much around the house to make it feel like a home, having a few more things has been quite nice. 

Keeping warm in drafty apartments

In the winter, perhaps one of the most noticeable differences between Canada and Japan is the fact that buildings in Japan do not really have central heating. Maybe some do, but I have yet to encounter such a luxury here. Things like double paned glass on windows and good insulation in the walls do not seem to exist here either, which means that our apartment does not retain heat well. Although even if we had real insulation, our apartment has a mail slot in the front door that is exposed directly to the outside air because the stairwell for our building is not enclosed. 

In some ways, the lack of central heating and insulation are not so terrible because it's much warmer around Tokyo than it is around Toronto in the winter (with an average low of 2.5°C in January compared to -6.7°C). However, having the temperature drop below 10 or 15°C in your apartment is pretty awful no matter where you are.

Fortunately, we are saved by space heating. While it is possible to buy air conditioning units that can be installed on the wall or in the ceiling to heat an entire room (and cool it in the summer), these can be expensive to purchase and operate so we don't have one at home. Instead, we have one small space heater for the bedroom and a kotatsu for the kitchen.

A kotatsu is basically a table with a heater underneath. By default, the table top is screwed into a frame with the legs and heater. In the winter, one can remove the top, put a blanket on top of the frame and replace the table top (minus screws). The blanket traps the heat from the heater, making for a really toasty space underneath. One can then put their legs or as much of their body as they can fit under the kotatsu and blanket to keep warm. 

As the only real furniture in our apartment,
the kotatsu also stores a lot of things.

Kotatsus are so useful and wonderful that this is the only piece of actual furniture we have bothered to get for our apartment (unless futons count as furniture) and it is something that we would totally have shipped to us when we move.

Since we left to visit our families before it got especially cold here, we only bought a blanket for the kotatsu yesterday. We installed the blanket last night and I promptly took a nap underneath it.

A good thing about the kotatsu is that since it only heats a small volume, it doesn't require as much energy as using a space heater to heat an entire room which is good for the wallet as well as the environment. It also means that if you want to heat the space to higher temperatures than you would heat a room, you're still not being especially wasteful. The only downside is that if you have to to leave the warmth of the kotatsu for bed after you've decided that sleeping on the floor with your arm as a pillow is not a good plan, you may quickly become be very uncomfortable.

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.