Showing posts with label kichijoji. Show all posts

23 March 2010

izu-bound!



Above: wall art in Kichijoji

All packed up and waiting in our empty, scrubbed clean, tiny little room for the landlords to come and pick up the keys. Home for the last few weeks has been a shared, seven-bedroom, one-bathroom house in Kichijoji, where fortunately we lucked out in terms of cool, chill roommates and relatively comprehensible waste management laws. As much as I've liked Kichijoji, though, I'm mostly just excited to get to Numazu in the Izu Peninsula, where - after a week of staying in a hotel while the other teachers clear out of the apartment - we can finally unpack our suitcases, maybe stick a photo or two up on the walls, and settle down for a full year, which will be the longest I've been settled anywhere in the two-plus years I've been traveling. Anyway, updates from Numazu to follow - for now, keep your fingers crossed for us that the landlord thinks the room is as clean as we do and gives us back all our security deposit money. 

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21 February 2010

recent explorations of kichijoji yield:


... Have you ever seen anyone so happy to be standing in front of a DOG WIZ sign? I didn't think so.

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18 February 2010

tokyo snow


This morning when we left the house, it was snowing: fat, wet, lazy drifting flakes that had somehow managed to cover most of our neighborhood in a thin layer. I hadn't realized that I missed the snow in Aberdeen until then; but by the time we emerged from Shinjuku Station thirty minutes later, it had stopped and Shinjuku itself was pristine, if a little wet, with no sign of snow anywhere.

Not much else is going on: there was a small earthquake the other morning that woke both of us up; we are settling into a routine in Kichijoji - class for three hours in the morning, lunch, afternoons studying in the Douter coffee shop, where you can sit for hours as long as you don't mind sitting two inches way from the strangers at the next table, which means it's actually more personal space than the morning trains.

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16 February 2010

さいきん　きちじょじ　に　すんでいます。*


As if Japanese wasn't hard enough, my book has apparently been printed backwards.

This photo is pretty unimaginative, but it is a pretty apt embodiment of our return to Tokyo. Since arriving on Saturday to a tiny, warm room in trendy Kichijoji,  we haven't been up to much other than study. In part this is because we're taking an intensive 4 week Japanese course at ARC Academy that meets every day and has quizzes (I haven't had a quiz in ten years! I can already feel myself making those 'beginning of the semester' vows that I used to make at the beginning of every class in high school, the kind where you do all your homework and write super neatly for the first two weeks before sliding back into your messier, less overachieving ways) ; and in part this is because we are not getting paid again until the end of April, and so are embarking on a life of monastic asceticsm. Now that we've paid our rent and tuition, we're settling down to see just how cheaply it's possible to live in one of the most expensive cities in the world. It's not that bad - Tokyo is too cold to explore, or at least, too cold to explore when you have six more weeks of it; the awesome Lenora will be coming to visit in two weeks so we can explore then; and, as my as-yet-unread level TWO (I've almost made it to level TWO!) book in the picture shows, we're kept quite busy studying. Or procrastinating studying, by writing in blogs, for example. So much for those vows. 

* Or, "These days, I live in Kichijoji." I think. 

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