Tuesday, October 09, 2012

The toilets here go from ridiculous to sublime, with the one in our apartment being somewhere in between.  The holes in the floor are ridiculous and the ones in the hotel rooms I stayed in last week are sublime.  They have heated seats and a button to push to heat up the water.  Then there are several features from which to choose depending on how you want to get sprayed off when you have finished your job.  You can adjust the spray to just hit you in the “back” or switch it to hit you in the “front”.  Now the only purpose of the toilet paper is to dry you off!  I love these toilets and wish I had one in my bathroom in Idaho Falls.  My brother, Brad, loved them so much he did install one in his house, so you’ll have to go over there and check it out!  The one in our apartment is quite interesting.  It is a regular toilet, but above the tank is a fountain where water flows when you flush.  We are still trying to figure out the purpose of that, maybe you can help me with that!

Driving

They drive on the wrong side of the road over here.  I am still trying to get used to it, even though I don’t drive over because we don’t have a car so we walk or ride the train everywhere we go.  But when I am riding with someone and I see a car coming at us it still freaks me out a little and I feel like we are going to get in an accident.  Scott actually grabbed the stick shift and put Wenji’s car in park the other day, because he thought he was driving.  He was in “the driver’s seat”.  It is also disconcerting when the person who you think should be driving turns around and talks to you paying no attention to the road whatsoever!

This next story is not really about Japan, but about how we almost didn’t come to Japan.  About 2 days before we were supposed to leave to come I could hear Scott gagging in the kitchen.  I ran in and asked him if he was okay and he shook his head no.  He had swallowed a huge calcium pill and it went down sideways and got stuck part way down his throat.  I tried the Heimlich maneuver, but I was frantic and couldn’t do it high enough or hard enough.  Finally he ran as hard as he could in to the edge of our granite counter top and the pill came flying out.  He said he is surprised the island didn’t move he hit it so hard.  Really this story is about how to save your own life if necessary and how to help others in distress.  To my credit I did save two of my own children, Ty ad Todd, when they were little and chocking on candy!  Anyway, all Scott and I could think of while he was chocking was “we did all this preparation and now we’re not going to Japan!

Packaging

We figured out why Japanese people are so skinny.  All you have to do is go to the store and buy a package of cookies or a million other things to figure this out.  We were hungry for chocolate chip cookies so we bought a bag.  When we got home and opened them up this is what we found.

You would have thought I would have learned my lesson, but no.  Yesterday I bought some chocolate topped shortbread biscuits.  It is the little one in the middle of Scott’s hand.  They are delicious, but it takes the whole package to fill you up!

When people ask you where you are from you must say, “America”.  Most of them have no idea what the United States is; they just know it as America!

Garbage

You need a Master’s Degree just to be able to sort the garbage around here.  They gave us a poster, and thankfully it has pictures, but they are still difficult to decipher.  We have to sort our trash into 4 different colored bags and then put it outside in a bin on a specific day.  It is pretty crazy.  They pick the garbage up every day, Monday through Friday, but they only take the bags that are the right color for that day!