インフォメーションGET!!!

First off, yes: I'm alive. Yes: I like my new town pretty well. NO: I DON'T HAVE INTRONET YET D:

BUT HOW AM I MAKING THIS POST??? (lolallcaps)

My ALT-sempai (that's senior assistant language teacher) was kind enough to invite me over for dinner & for to make use of his interwebbernets connection, which is far faster than what is available at the school where I work. Also, the school doesn't want me bringing my personal laptop to work and hooking it up, because I guess they're afraid of spreading viruses or something. So I have a dinosaur of a laptop to use there (if Jenni is reading this, remember your old laptop? EVEN SLOWER). It can't handle image-laden websites, or even very large images for that matter. I froze it up today just trying to load a desktop-sized picture of Navy Pier.

But anyway, back to the low-down on my new digs.

I have a little one-bedroom apartment that's out on the main road between Ise and Shima (Ise being chock full o' shrines, and Isobe, the part of Shima where I live and work, being chock full o' liquor stores and old people as far as I can tell). When I figure out how to stick pictures in the middle of posts, I'll update this post with some shots so you can have visual aids to supplement your vibrant imaginings.

SURPRISE UPDATE! PICTUARS ARE HEAR :B

This is what I wake up to every morning. Mountains, greenery, and the sun streaming through my hideous pastel-flower curtains at 5 in the morning. I'll upload more pictures of my bedroom once it's redecorated a bit so it is fit to evoke admiration rather than pity. The good news is the tatami mats are clean. There are spiders living under them, but I figure they keep the really nasty bugs from taking over the spaces beneath my floors, so they can stay down there. I'm certainly not going in after them.


Kitchen / "lounge area" - directly behind me is the TV and a sliding door that leads out onto a patio just large enough to hold my wee-tiny washing machine & racks for drying clothes. That big yellow plastic tube you see in the foreground is a toxic powder that you spread about outside your domicile in an ancient Japanese voodoo ritual to ward off crawly things. Actually, it doesn't ward them off so much as guarantee that if they walk across the chalky white line and enter your living space, they will succumb to the malice of evil spirits sometime within a week or so. Maybe.

Anyway, at $230 a month this place would be a steal by any American's standards, and to someone like myself who has become accustomed to living out of a single room with a stacked bed-and-workspace and one sink on the far wall, it almost seems like too much space. Almost. I've managed to make a pretty spectacular mess of it thus far, so I would say the settling-in process is going quite well.

However, the previous occupants either didn't see fit to clean it . . . EVER . . . before they left, or it has been vacant for a looooooong long time, because when I first walked in the smell from the shower room was ominous, to say the least, and everything in the kitchen/TV area had a disturbing stickiness about it that humidity alone just couldn't account for. I won't even talk about the stove top, since the landlord has since replaced it with a shiny new one that makes me very very happy because that's one less surface to sanitize. I am also happy to report that I have a gas stove, so cooking is not so much of an ordeal as it could be, although the heat and humidity tend to make the prospect of preparing hot food quite disenchanting.

Anyway, so far the local insect population has seen fit to keep to the outdoors. Everywhere outdoors. All over the building, the stairs, the walls, the lights . . . but there are no monstrous bird-eating spiders or poisonous centipedes or wee-tiny little tatami mat bugs inside. The little tatami mites ("dani") are actually probably the worst pests you could find indoors, because they're too small to see, they bite you all over during the night, and they're at the bottom of the food chain for all the other wriggly crawly nasty beasties you don't want to see in your room. You learn about so many fun things living out in the boonies in Japan.

I do love the nature, though, for the most part. There are cute little crabs roaming about the "river" (actually more of a salty backwash from the sea that runs through a weedy ditch outside my apartment building) that wave their tiny arms at me whenever I pass by and startle them, and rumor has it there are monkeys in the little arm of forest that cuts into my neighborhood. The other day from my window I saw a Japanese raccoon-dog napping outside in the shrubbery. It was quite possibly the cutest animal I have ever seen, something like a cross between a marten and a big brown fox with black stripes across its eyes, black limbs, and a skinny little tail. Apparently they're very common around wooded areas, and Isobe is pretty woodsy. There's a short-cut to my high school up a hill and through a patch of bamboo forest that grows up to the baseball fields behind Shima High School. It's a little rough, but it gets me to work in 15 minutes instead of 25, taking the long way around down the large roads with no sidewalks. Also it's cooler under the trees, and there are always pretty emerald dragonflies with black wings fluttering about.

Since it's still summer vacation in Japan, I won't have any classes until September, which means I pretty much sit around all day at my desk, reviewing my old Japanese textbook and attempting to make small-talk with my co-workers. They're all very nice, thankfully, nothing like the frigid, enigmatic, alien beings we were warned about during the big JET orientation in Tokyo. The orientation sessions kinda reminded me of the talks we had to attend at Nanzan University for foreign students, in that the negative aspects of culture-shock and the possibility of terrible things happening were way overblown (re: the infamous "Japan is not safe" presentation that has been the subject of much mockery amongst my group of Nagoya-buddies). I'm not feeling too isolated despite the language barrier and the fact that I'm living in the inaka ("heart of the rice field," literally; in more colloquial America-speak, "the sticks"). I don't feel shunned and unwanted by my co-workers. My supervisor and several of the teachers speak very good English. I have another JET at my school who's been here a year and can help me figure stuff out. By Tokyo-Orientation standards I'm living in a fantasy world.

Heart of a rice field! That's my apartment right there. Despite what lies perspective might be trying to impress upon you, there's actually no direct way to get to it from the main road (hint: this little footpath right here is not "the main road" - it's that dark line running through the middle of the picture). You have to walk past it and down a little side street to get to the driveway what leads to the apartment parking lot. It's a little bit inconvenient, but I would much rather see cranes wading in the reeds outside my window than blacktop or concrete.

I haven't been able to compare experiences with my fellow Mie prefecture JETs yet, except to some extent Nicole, since I have her phone number. I've started using my old cell phone from Nagoya, but because it's so out of date and I don't have my foreign-resident ID card yet (affectionately referred to as "the gaijin card") I can only use a prepaid SIM-card - the cell phone companies won't let an undocumented immigrant contract with them. What gives, right? That's downright un-American. To be fair, I am actually pretty well-documented. I'm just waiting on the bureaucracy now.

This also means that I can't get a phone company to hook up internet service at my apartment yet. If my local city hall is to be believed, my gaijin card won't be ready to pick up until August 14th. Which means I can't apply for internet service and a cell phone contract until then. Which kind of really bites. 'Cause that means I can't really use Skype unless I'm ganking AJ's intarwebz at his place, and even though he's invited me I've already soaked up enough Japanese sensibility to feel bad about imposing. But my supervisor and I have done all we can; now it's up to the government. That's never a phrase you want to use.