At last some pictures of the house and such...

It costs a bit to get moved in over here. Here is a picture of the stack of Yen we had to give to the housing agent in order to sign our lease.

952,100 Yen to be exact. Thank God the Navy gives us a monthly housing allowance to cover the monthly rent of 230,000 Yen (way more than they would ever give us in the states!!) and gave us money to cover the Owner bonus, the agent bonus and the agents income tax on their bonus. They also loaned us the money to cover the security deposit which was equal to one months rent. The only thing we had to come up with was our renters insurance which was 20,600 Yen for a year.

Gifts of Chocolate for our new neighbors as well as for the electricians.

Our beautiful front door!

This is the living room. According to the housing blueprint this is a guest bedroom, making this a 5 bedroom house. We chose to have it be the living room. Somehow I had thought it had Tatami floors, but I guess my memory was playing with me. We then chose to have the 'dining room' be a play room and the 'living room' which is right off the kitchen be the dining room...

One of my favorite features is the Ofuro (Oh-foo-roh), a bathtub that is about 3 ft long, and 2 1/2 ft deep. Ours is very new and all you must do is push a button on the touch pad that you see above the end there and it will automatically fill for you with 42 C water and when it's done filling, a little song plays and a voice calls out to you in Japanese that your tub is ready for you. There is also a control for it from the main water heater control panel located in the kitchen, so you can fill your tub from there and listen for the chime. Something else nice about it is that there is a call button from the one in the tub that chimes the kitchen in case you need something while relaxing in your tub, which by the way you could stay in all day without ever worrying about the water getting cold, because there is a thermometer that constantly tests the water and when it starts to cool, begins re-circulating the water out through a pipe, heats it using propane and sends it back into your tub toasty hot!!! AHHHHHH......

The only thing is, you must never use soap in your Ofuro, as it will cake and clog the recirculating system.

The shower and the tub are all in one enclosed room that's probably about 6ft x 6ft. The shower head just comes off the wall in there, so it's a very spacious shower. The shower head is quite low (just over 5ft up). An interesting feature is this waist high mirror... I guess personal grooming is paramount.

A picture from inside what is now the play room into what is the dining room/computer area. Just now, I'm sitting in the cubby there on the left of the picture. I've opened the doors to the cabinet there and put my computer there with my desk just underneath. What a great way to save space! The doors you see on the right lead out to our back yard. The next picture you see was taken from that corner where you see the curtain.

Our sun porch!! This porch is the length of 4 double sliding glass doors, and comes equipped with gold, orange and brown curtains from the 70's to help block out the cold at night, lol!! This entire side of the house is floor to ceiling glass doors and windows, as just on the other side of that stairway is the living room with it's glass doors.

The view from the dinning room. I LOVE the Shoji (Sho-gee) doors that also can be pulled closed to make a whole wall of paper doors, which also really help to keep the house warm at night. Ha, who would think that paper could make such a difference!

Unfortunatly Shoji and DH don't seem to get along very well, as he has already put about 4 or 5 holes in our Shoji doors in just over a week!! Luckily the supplies to repair them are readily available at 'Livin' (Japan's equivilent to Wal-Mart, and infact they sell some of the same brands) for really quite cheap and it looks relatively simple to replace. We'll see. When I undertake that task, I'll take pictures and blog about it in case anyone out there happens to be in need of knowing what not to do when repairing Shoji, haha!

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A portion of my kitchen

The glass encased shelves make a great place to display DH's crystal and china that he inherited from his aunt and grandmother. We just pray that there wont be a biggish earthquake while we're here, though more for our own safety than that of the dishes, but it really would be sad to loose such heirlooms.

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Here we have the other side of the kitchen, and yes that one cupboard door is totally a different color! I find it amusing that the counter tops are just below my waist level, while the upper cupboards start at about 6 1/2 ft from the floor, meaning that I need a step stool to pretty much reach anything that's not just inside the door. The counter space is less now, because we have a dishwasher on there now... (pictures to come)

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Once I get a chance to clean this, this is meant to be a place to store emergency supplies. It opens right up out of the kitchen floor. I guess many Americans use these as wine cellers, since they stay cold pretty much year around. While I suppose drunkenness could make a natural disaster not seem quite so bad for a few hours, I would much rather have food and water in mine...

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Cooking facilities! My two burners, fish grill, and oven. They all run on propane and the oven and burner/grill are two seperate units. Many houses do not even have an oven, just the fish grill that you see there above the oven. I've discovered that the left burner has a great feature. It has a sensor that shuts off the gas when your pan/tea kettle gets lighter than a certain weight, thus keeping you from boiling your pot dry!

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The smallest oven I've ever seen!!! This oven is about 13 x 10 x 13 inches, and workes kinda like a microwave in that you put your food in there, turn a knob to set the time and push start (well presumably start, I don't know it japanese, I just know it makes it go). Then the fire roares and cooks your food for you at whatever temp Celcius you happened to guess was close to the degrees farenheit that you need to cook your food at. When you open the door, the fire shuts off instantly (no heating the house with this oven...).

Side note, our microwave can't be used for longer than 10 seconds at a time without flipping a breaker, which happens to shut off power to half of the lower part of the house, and possible parts of upstairs... Breaker systems don't seem to be set up at all the same here as back in the states. Thank goodness for breakers though, because due to the dry electric or kerosene heat we use, the wood in this house is very very very dry! Sometimes I think that perhaps a few people could pick up the house and move it if they wanted to, since the wood is so dry and many of the doors are hollow paper covered 2mm wood in wooden frames, and some are just paper with wooden cross beams...

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A before picture of part of my favorite room in the house before it became 'The Man Room".

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The upstairs toilet complete with hand sink attached to the top of the tank. Only downfall here is that the water is freezing cold... Not gonna kill many germs that way. There is a sink right outside the door, however, the hot water doesn't work, because the pipes are rusted shut from unuse.

Our super tiny laundry facilities! It's been an interesting trial and error system trying to figure out what cycles do what, as the instruction sheet I got just told me things like 'this button selects which cycle', but no where did it saw what any of the cycles do, lol. Yes, I know I've got my hand in a few of these pictures, thats as a reference point to show size.

Here come the back yard pictures!

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One of two bamboo fountains

Some pics from out front.

My personal addition to the house...

a Japanese Apricot tree that I got at the commisary for $15

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I love this front gate!! The brownish thing on the right isn't supposed to be like that, it's supposed to be across the parkingspot over to the right. It's my fault that it's there like that, as it's our parkingspot it's supposed to be covering.

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Just in front of the front door.

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The 5 ft deep gutter that runs behind the house...

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Trash seperation...

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After my trip to the local market and inability to keep myself from buying the tiny little cute eggs, we had a breakfast of quail eggs. DD LOVED them and ate 9 of them for breakfast. Unfortunatly, she has now decided that chicken eggs are not so good... They taste much like chicken eggs, just not quite such a strong egg flavor. I liked them too, but had a hard time getting past the fact that they were quail eggs. Not sure why it should make any difference at all, but for some reason it just made them hard to swallow...

Well, that's it for this post. I just ran around and snapped a bunch more pictures during short breaks while I was typing this up, and I'll start that blog, but nap time is almost over, so I probably wont get the next one done for a little bit.

A day of adventures (lots of pictures)

Monday, being a holiday, we decided to take the day and go exploring.  DH had done some exploring last week as part of the AOB/ICR class, and wanted to show me some of the things he had seen as well as pass along what he had learned about navigating the train system.  While I will also be going through the class next week, I was excited for the opportunity to get out and see some of the local sights.  

Our first necessity was to hop the base bus to the main gate and head north to the train station, where we purchased our tickets from the automated ticketing system and headed through the turnstyles and out onto the platform.  This being my first time ever riding a train, I wasn't sure what to expect.  The platform was rather bleak and grey with a few wooden benches.  Trains pulled up and left every few minutes and the trick was to figure out which train you wanted to be on before it left.  We found our train and headed off in search of some sights.  I plan to give you train thoughts and insights at a later point, as this blog has just way too much to cover otherwise.

Following are quite a few pictures that tell the story of our day.  

 

This picture is from the park just to the north of the main gate.  On the left side of the little harbor, you can see some large dark grey ships and on the right side of the harbor are a bunch of lighter grey ships and some submarines.  The interesting thing is that the darker grey ships and the subs are Japanese Navy, while the lighter grey ships are US Navy.  I found it quite interesting to see both navies' ships in such close proximity.  Good thing we are allies!!

Here is a beautiful fountain in the park, if you click on it, you'll get a better look.  There are probably hundreds of rose bushes in this park, though at this time of year, they aren't much to look at.  I'll try to remember to snap some shots later on, when they are in bloom.

Here is where you buy your train tickets.  You select how much you want to pay for your ticket based on how far you are going, and press the button for that amount of Yen.  The machine spits out your tickets and you are good to go.  When you exit the train station, you put your ticket in a little slot and the turnstyles open to let you out.  Well, that is unless you underestimated how much you needed to pay, in which case, it will tell you how much you owe, you drop in a few coins and you are on your way.  This is also a great system in that if you accidentally stay on a stop too far, you can simply get off the train and catch one back the other way, as you only put your ticket stub in on your way out of the station.  In theory, you could ride the train all day long as long as you never left a station during a stop, for 190 Yen.

Our first stop in Kamakura.  I don't know the name of the temple we headed off to, but this is the walking road to it.  The vehicle road is on either side of this walkway which extends for probably a quarter mile or more, with these orange and white paper lanterns lineing the whole way.  Proof that it can't possibly rain as much here as it does in Seattle.

A side view of the original bridge that led to the temple.  This bridge is no longer used, and I'm a little glad, cause it is very steep.  I tried to get a picture of the giant Koi (24+ inches long) that were in the ponds, but the water was too murky.  

The view of the temple from the street

The area for cleansing oneself before entering the holy area.  One is to fill a dipper with water from the fountain, holding the dipper with their right hand, and use the water to rinse their left, then they pass the dipper to the left and rinse the right, then the dipper is again placed in the right hand and the left hand is filled with water which is sucked into the mouth and then spit into the ditch, finally, the dipper is filled once more and raised in such a way to cause the water to rinse the handle, then is placed back on the rack.  I didn't get any pictures of people doing this, as I still don't know how to ask people if I may take their photo and am timid at attempting it in a sign language fashion.

This is one of the small buildings down below the temple.  I kinda forgot to take a picture of the temple during the long hike up the stairs to get to it.  No photos were permitted inside, which was a dissappointment, but had to be respected. (sorry, I guess if you want to see inside it, you'll have to come to Japan)

Sake, anyone??

These are barrels of rice wine (or representations, I'm not sure)

A wall covered with prayer boards.

On our walk back to the train, I happened to see this crystal in the window which you could buy for 1,500,000 Yen (around $16,600 give or take).

I don't even want to guess how much this one would cost.  It was about 2 ft tall.  Also it was flanked by two 6 ft tall amethyst geodes.  I didn't get a picture of those though, as the lady inside didn't seem to keen on my taking photos of this.

Back at the train station to head to another point of interest in Kamakura.  This is the bicycle, and moped parking lot for the station.

A short ride and a super short walk later and we found ourselves at the foot of the Giant Buddha.  It turns out that this guy is only about 11 miles from base by car.  A very interesting sight for sure.  I have seen it's image many times over the years, in books and magazines, but it really was something to actually see it.

For 20 Yen, you may go inside the Giant Buddha and see how he was contructed.  It's pretty amazing, and certainly well worth the minimal cost!

Some windows in Buddha's back.  I at first presumed they were put there to let light in for those who wanted to go in, however, I later learned that initially this statue was built inside a huge temple.  The temple was washed away by a tidal wave about 750 years ago or so, and Buddha has been outside since then.  Which still leaves me wondering, 'what were those windows built in his back for, way back then?'

For those who have been interested by my toileting adventure.

While at the Buddha, I decided that it was as good a time as any to use the facilities, since I knew where they were and might not have such ease of finding them again somewhere else.  I braced myself, for the typical tourist area/parks and recreation restrooms I've become accustomed to back in the states and walked into the restroom.  To my amazement, the restroom was entirely fitted with tile (clean grout too), and granite stalls and walls with clean metal doors (not one word of graffiti did I see).  What I also noticed was that on one side, there were squat toilets and on the other were the western toilets, which I chose.  As I was exiting my stall, 4 Japanese women entered the restroom and I watched out of the corner of eye to see which they would choose, and every single one of them chose the squat toilets, which sort of surprised me, until I thought about how germ concious they are, and the fact that toilet seat covers are not offered in any public restrooms that I have yet seen.  Lucky for me, I am comfortable with the 'hover' with a western toilet, so I'm safe without having to squat down to 2 inches off the floor to use the facilities.

 

After we left the Buddha, we started heading back to the train station and I saw these interesting girl and boy yarn dolls in a window and couldn't help myself, I had to take their pictures. Strangely, I swear I've seen pictures of them before.

As we continued our walk, I kept looking in shop windows and then we took a little side street, in my hopes of finding a fabric store (a promise to my sis and mom).  We did finally find a little fabric/Kimono store (sorry, no photos, cameras and cell phones were prohibited in the store).  The fabrics were beautiful mostly, and very pricey!  One could buy a meter of fabric 1/2 meter wide for 1500 - 3600 Yen.  So, sorry, I didn't purchase anything there either.  DH and DD had wondered on while I went into the store, and I'm so glad they did, because as I left the store and looked up the street for them, I noticed that at the end of the road, there was the enterance to another temple area.  So busy I had been looking for a fabric store that I hadn't even noticed.

This temple had much bigger grounds than the first one we saw.  From the enterance, you couldn't even see the temple, it is way up the hill of stairs.  The stairs you see in this picture make up about a third of the stairs to get to the temple.

Before we headed up to the temple, we noticed this cave and decided to go exploring

The initial cave is tall enough to stand up in, however this tunnel leading off from the main entrance is probably about 4 ft tall, and leads into another smaller cave that is also tall enough to stand in (unless you are 6 ft or taller).  From there another tunnel leads off with a small cave off the side of it and then it takes you back outside.  I'm definitely glad we went through the cave, I loved it!

One of the statues in the second cave.

Some super cute little statues.  These were my favorites.

An army of statues!  These little guys were everywhere!  Here and there, some of them had little knitted hats and shawls that people had brought for them to keep them warm.

Some of the gifts that people had left for one of the statues in a shrine.  

The adjoining cemetary

For 100 Yen you could buy your fortune.  Then you were to take it, and tie it around a cord nearby, say your prayer and hope it came true (or hope it didn't I suppose, depending on the outcome).

One of the beautiful gardens at this temple.

I was naughty and snuck this picture.  In the main part of the temple, where I could not be sneaky, there was a probably 20 ft tall gold statue, with a very ornate background.  I really wanted to get a picture, but there was just no way to do so without interupting people's prayers and worship, which is why I presume pictures are not allowed.

A small bamboo forest, where the bamboo was easily 20 ft tall and 5 in across.

Just part of the hike up the stairs to 'prospect road'.  There were alot of stairs at this temple.  DH is my hero though, as he carried DD in her stroller, up all of the stairs and again back down!!

The hike may have been long, but the view was incredible!!!

When we got back to town we decided to go out for dinner.  On the way to dinner I decided to snap a shot of an allway crosswalk.  Basically the way it works is that the intersection lets cars go lets say north and south (no pedestrians), then it lets the cars go east and west (again, no pedestrians), and then all the cars stop and the people are allowed to cross the intersection in any direction they choose, including diagonal.  When you think about it, it probably actually reduces the number of pedestrians who get hit by cars that are taking a corner.
 

And my final picture of the day.  The view from the Italian restaurant we ate at, which was on the 9th floor of the mall.  Had the best margharita pizza I've ever had!  The only difficulty was making ourselves walk out the doors without leaving a tip.  The service was fantastic, DD made a big mess, I really wanted to tip, but in Japan (unless you're on the base), tipping is not expected, nor accepted.  They will follow you out and bring you the money you 'forgot'.  It is actually considered an insult if they understand that you were trying to tip them, because it implies that they are the kind of person who must be bribed in order to do the job they were hired to do.