chamofleur

locally-sourced gridanian potato.

  • she/her

ffxiv / misc. games / whatever i feel like talking about. all opinions are my own!!!


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i've been back in japan for a little more than two weeks now, and things are moving along as nicely as they can be, i'd say! i finally started commuting into work, which is something i have not done since 2020... honestly, i was surprised at how painless it felt to go back to working at an office. i think it helps that the train i take to get to work is not as crowded in the mornings as other lines, which i am extremely grateful for. if it was hectic every day i'd probably get tired of it much more quickly. it also helps that the office environment is surprisingly comfy in its own weird way, though i think once i settle in more i'll end up working from home after a few months have passed and i get used to things, because i know for a fact i want to keep morning walks to the train station in summertime to a minimum.

i won't be able to say i am fully settled in until we are out of our placeholder apartment and we get all our furniture and stuff back from the moving company and i feel like i can finally call somewhere "home" again... thankfully, we found a very cute house! it is a relatively new house with 3 bedrooms, 2 toilets (rare!!!) and a nice living/dining/kitchen area with actual cooking space and a big sink for washing dishes!!! wow!!! in terms of total square feet, it's actually the same size as our 2-bedroom apartment in california was, but...our apartment in california had a lot of empty space (mostly because i have moved between states and countries so many times in my life that i did not want to get a bunch of furniture on the off chance something like a move to japan happened...which it did, so good foresight on my part, i guess!!)

the rooms themselves are a little small compared to your average american apartment, but we planned out how and where we wanted to put our things, so now our things will look cozy, but not overcrowded...or so we hope! we won't know for sure until all our furniture from home actually gets here! there's still a bunch of new things we'll have to get that we either never had or couldn't take with us, like a new double bed, a new couch/tv/tv stand for the living room, curtains, rugs, and appliances and such. i emphasize the curtains and rugs because this is a wooden base house, which is the most popular type of house/building in japan, and wooden houses are awful at retaining heat and being soundproof, so you have to take as many preliminary sound-dampening/insulation methods as you can get...especially when you're a foreigner, because you do not want to contribute to the "foreigners are rude and loud!!" stereotype...

obviously, with new furniture and utilities, plus the initial costs of renting the house (initial housing costs are VERY costly in japan!!!!), it's gonna take a decent chunk of my savings, but this is why i am frugal for basically everything else all the time. my general stance on life is that i don't really need or want to buy a lot of random stuff, like games or collectibles or anything--i just want to focus my financial energy on keeping a comfy place to live and cooking healthy meals and have enough of the leftover cash saved for the random times where i Do need to replace something or get a game, or if i need to pay medical bills or what have you. i consider myself very lucky that i have the means to do this.

howEVER!!! the one time i will break this rule here in japan is in the case of WASHERS!!! in japan, people don't have washer/dryers. just washers, and they'll generally hang their clothes to dry, or use a cool feature in their shower room that lets them hang up clothes while the building vent system dries it for them. but this is the first time in a long time i've not had to use a fucking coin laundry!!! (i am so sick of coin laundries.) so i'm going crazy and will probably get like, a high-end front-loading panasonic washer/dryer that can dry your clothes in an hour and a half (this is an INSANELY short time for japanese washer/dryers!! generally drying takes 4-5 hours!), as long as our house wiring system allows for it...which, according to our realtor, it does?? so let's hope she was right. otherwise the collars on ryan's game shirts may never shrink down and he will Not be a happy camper.

anyway i could go on forever about house stuff in japan, so i'll save that for another post when we're actually decorating it and stuff. other than that we've been exploring tokyo. i took ryan to laketown one day since i needed to get a decent-looking outfit for my first day of office work and we got all-you-can-eat kbbq, which was very good. i wanted to take him specifically to the capcom store because his birthday was coming up (it is today at the time of this post!!) and i wanted to get him battle network remaster collection merch if they had it because he loves megaman.exe, but it was mostly dai-gyakuten saiban and monhun world merch. i told him we could go back after the battle network stuff releases this spring.

we also took a trip to the skytree mall a while ago, which was super nice, but waaay too cramped and crowded for my tastes... the only solace is that everyone here is still wearing masks, unlike back home, so it's not as daunting to go out, but that might be changing in may, apparently. (although it's hard to say. i think most people will probably keep masking for everyone else because of the whole "omoiyari/caring for others" thing. the japanese government has been trying very hard to get people to take off their masks, but it's not really working.)

this weekend i think we're just taking it easy though. we got domino's pizza (again...) last night because, again, no place to really cook much here, so we might take a trip around the neighborhood today to walk it off and then get dinner for ryan's birthday, but we'll see how we feel.

ok i will shush now but thank you for reading!! i hope you all have a very good weekend!! stay warm!! (or i guess cool if you're in the southern hemisphere!!!)


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in reply to @chamofleur's post:

Happy birthday, Ryan!! I'm glad to hear it sounds like y'all are doing as best you can be with settling into Japan!! Please take it easy this weekend!!!!

Also god, yeah, no one ever warns folks about washers and dryers in Japan. We were thrown for a loop when we first visited. While some of the airbnbs we stayed at had some drying functionalities, as you said, it takes a while... (Thankfully, we were more prepared about how to handle laundry the next time we visited, haha.) I hope you find the washer/dryer of your dreams!!

thank you ruby!!! i have relayed to ryan your birthday wishes!! i hope you are all doing well too!!

on the way to ryan's birthday dinner today we ended up stopping at a mall that had an appliance store and i took the time to explain the different panasonic washer/dryers to him and i think i finally narrowed down the right one to get, though we're waiting a bit before we make our "basic house appliances" purchase because apparently you can like, haggle with the salespeople if you find cheaper price matches and buy in bulk and stuff so i'm going to try my luck with that. we will...see how it goes with my slightly rusty conversational skills.