Apartment at House Elm

Hello,

This is the view from our walk from our hotel to the University.  This photo was taken in the middle of the street in front of the JR Train Station.  The mountains in the distance look exciting.

Someone requested a photo of the crowds,  so below is a photo of the people getting off the subway at JR station.  What is not being captured in the photo is the crush of people all around you.  I am not sure how to get a photo of that.

 This photo is a little bit surreal with the window washer on our bank seeming to float in the air.

 The fall colors are great with the early morning sun coming through the leaves.

 Below is a photo of Kakemura-san, or as she has requested I call her, Maiko.  She is standing next to the sign for the building, the Institute of Seismology and Volcanology.  She has been very helpful for Bre and me.  Speaking of needing help, in our new apartment we had two problems.  One was that the water that we thought was turned on was actually turned off, and we didn't know how to turn it back on.  The other issue was that we found mildew in several places in the apartment and it has a bad mildew smell.

I went to the convenience store last night and bought a bottle of water.  We camped out in the apartment last night.  This morning we got up early and came to school to send Tanioka-san an email asking for help getting the water turned on.  We don't have internet at our apartment or cell phones so communication is difficult.  We had to go back to our apartment because the man from the gas company was coming out this morning to turn on the gas.  The man from the gas company didn't speak very much english, though he did speak more English than we speak Japanese.  In the process of testing the hot water heater the man from the gas company was able to turn on the water.  We were very very excited.  Water and gas.  I learned Mizu is water and Gazu (sp?) is gas.  Doomo Arigato is thank you.

Anyway, going back to Tanioka-san.  We had sent him the email that our water was out.  After the man from the gas company came and fixed everything we went into the University.  I remembered that we had sent the email to Tanioka-san, and I had an image of him going to our apartment while we were not there.  I asked Maiko where Tanioka-san had gone, she said that he had just left a few minutes ago to go to our place.  She was able to call him and tell him to come back.  The whole situation was quite funny and everyone chuckled.  A comedy of timing, you might say.

Tanioka-san called the landlord about the mold problem and the landlord promised to call the cleaning company.  So hopefully that ties up our loose ends.

 Here are some photos of lunch.  The first photo is Bre's lunch of tofu, miso soup, rice, and chicken that was coated in mayo and fried.  The second photo is pretty much the same except instead of fried chicken there is a dish with fish.  The fish is covered by plastic.

 Here is a photo of the outside of our apartment building.   We moved into the apartment last night.  Tanioka-san gave us a ride to the big Aeon store where we got some bedding, a pot for cooking, cleaning supplies, and some food.  I will include more photos of the apartment at a later date.

 These photos are all by Bre of me on the new (to us) bike.

That's all for now.

-Kyle (and Bre)