First post - Our house

Hey peeps,

Well, for this first post I'm going to cheat and paste a mass email I just sent out to y'all.  So if you got the email, it will look familiar - sorry.

However the goal of this blog is to avoid too many mass emails (I never know who wants them and who is annoyed at the inbox clutter!).  So for regular updates please check here.  I will endeavour to update regularly :)

Hey all,


Ok, so this is the email you have been waiting on the edge of your seats for!! Ok, it’s not actually an email yet, it’s currently a word document because our internet is super intermittent, but it WILL be an email! Fingers crossed!

It is now Saturday morning, on no, wait, 3pm. So very afternoon! Ok, so it is now Saturday afternoon. We have had a super lazy day, reading and eating and not a lot else. As soon as Jeff has a shower we are going to go for a walk around our village and take some photos. It is so cute here, it is a photographer’s dream!

Although we are very rural, we are in the middle of the Jinseki village, with the doctor out front and someone’s garden fence out back. On the right (as you face the house) we are attached to an identical little house and on the left is the parking for a little chemist (currently we don’t have net curtains in the kitchen and I’m sick of the chemist’s patients staring in my kitchen window at the weird gaijin – foreigner – so guess what’s top of my shopping list!).

As for the structure of our village… it’s very hard to describe. Suffice it to say that the city hall is currently in the process of working out our address! If this doesn’t make any sense to you, consider these instructions to our house from the lights a few hundred metres away:

Take the left turn at the lights (not the sharp left, the other left), cross the bridge and immediately turn left before the barber’s pole. Make a right between the tomato plants and the motorbike (or the covered car parks if the bike has moved!) and come up the little hill. The road then splits into two driveway/roads and we are the left one, the first house you come to. If your car is the size of NZ ones, it may not fit in our driveway, so best park further down the road…

Each of the village roads are separated by waterways that vary between ditches and canals. They tend to be twice as deep as they are wide and are affectionately known as ‘gaijin traps’.



Ok, part II, written Monday morning.

Jeff left at 5:30am today for a week-long language camp. After a nice sleep-in I have settled down to finish writing our Japan update. Whether I will succeed in sending it before Jeff gets home is questionable – the internet is so sucky I have stayed clear of it except when Jeff tells me ‘It’s working! Quick, do what you need to do online!’

Ok, I have just put the dishes away. This gives me much happiness, as when we have just put away the clean dishes (and have not yet made any more dirty ones) is the only time we have any bench space, the draining space on the sink being IT. We have taken to using the top of the fridge (thankfully Japanese size, i.e. short) as extra bench space. The top of the microwave is treated as a kitchen shelf, although it may soon also be used as bench space… This lack of space has meant a need for organisation and tidiness that does not come naturally to either of us (although I admit Jeff struggles less with the tidy concept than I do). However, we have to remember that we will come out of this better, tidier people! Or we will start doing food prep on the kitchen floor…

However, the lack of space in the kitchen is one of our only quibbles about our BEAUTIFUL house. I love it so much! Downstairs we have a large kitchen, roughly 4m by 4m, connected to a slightly smaller lounge by traditional sliding doors with oriental-style flowers painted on the bottom. Our lounge has tatami mat floors, traditional wood and pale green walls, a rice paper door to the washing line, a cream couch and a small square table that we eat from while sitting on the floor (well, I sit on the floor. Jeff normally cheats and sits on the couch, although I nag him to practise sitting on the floor so he’s not uncomfortable when we go out to dinner at traditional places. Jeff hasn’t FORBIDDEN me to eat on the couch, but I am strongly discouraged, as my tendency to make a mess with my food doesn’t bode well on a cream couch…). The centre piece of the lounge is a beautiful suspended lamp with carved wooden scenes on each side, depicting unmistakeably-Japanese trees and mountains. Other than these two rooms, our ground floor has a laundry with bathroom sink, a bathroom with large wash area and bath, a separate toilet with eco sink (the water you wash your hands with fills the toilet cistern to be used on the next flush) and an entrance space for shoes (luckily it’s a big space to fit all my shoes  ).

Up some steep stairs we have two bedrooms – one with the same décor as the lounge, including sliding paper doors to the hallway and sliding paper doors for ‘curtains’ at the window. We are currently using the other one – wooden floor and cream walls – for our bedroom, as it has two windows. However, as we are sleeping on futon, which require putting away every morning and remaking every night, we can easily move into the tatami room when the weather cools down. We feel a bit weird about calling them ‘bedrooms’, because when we put the futon away, it becomes a bare floor with our bedside lamps, books and other odds and ends in two piles on the floor. I keep threatening that I won’t last long without a bed – putting it away every morning is such a hassle! – but then I see the price of things and I decide I can last a little longer on futon.

I believe everything will get easier when it cools down – including putting futon away. Currently it is so hot here that you wake sweating and just sweat your way through the day. Cold showers provide a brief respite, and if you’re LUCKY you need to drive somewhere so you can get in the car and crank the AC. Probably the worst of it is that the Japanese hardly sweat. As if I didn’t already feel massive and ungainly around them, I’m a red sweaty mess, while they have a mild sheen on them, if that. They even manage to keep makeup on – something I gave up on after one day here!

Ok, this is getting really long, so I’m going to sign off before I get too carried away. For the record, I intend to start a blog – if I can get online – so that you don’t get your inbox filled with long emails that you don’t have time to read. Until then…

Sayonara,

Charly (and Jeff – even though he hasn’t had a chance to see what I’ve written and signed his name to!)