Winter is coming...

I spotted snow on top of the mountains yesterday.  It's mid-October.  

*hisses* back, winter, back!

RENT

From what I've seen so far, living in the Japanese countryside (the inaka), is pretty cheap.  Even within the "biggest city in the prefecture" (which really isn't saying much... I'm pretty sure Lexington is more "city-like" than Aomori), most of my friends pay 10,000 yen or less monthly for rent (generally not including water).  I have a friend who is waaaay out in the inaka whose rent is less than half of that, though, and her house is huge!  But, on the other hand, she does have to drive a car if she wants to go anywhere.  I guess there are pros and cons to both sides.    

Mission Improbable

Apparently you can't escape the missionaries, even in a country where less than 1% of the population is Christian.  In fact, most Japanese people usually say they don't feel especially religious at all.  Religion in Japan is a mixture of Shinto and Buddhism, and the lines between the two often get very blurred.

 

I had a pleasant little chat with the missionaries about their experience with trying to spread Christianity in a predominently non-Christian country, but when the discussion turned to "my image of God" I declined to answer and wished them good evening.    

Chicken in the Water!

 

A few weeks ago, a group of us were at the beach and there were a couple of jellyfish in the water.  One of my friends pointed to the jellyfish and called it "karaage" (fried chicken) by accident instead of "kurage" (jellyfish), which lead to a nearby Japanese child looking very surprised and confused!

Check?

(I forgot to draw the speech bubbles.  Whoops.  Enjoy the glory of MS Paint-made speech bubbles.)
(Once again, clicking on the images makes them bigger and easier to read)

So today, after a very confusing conversation with my supervisor, I learned that checks aren't a thing in Japan.  I probably should have realized this earlier, considering when I got my bank account, they didn't give me a checkbook, but somehow it slipped my mind.  Apparently (as far as I can tell), when you need to give a large amount of money to someone, you just... withdraw cash and put it in an envelope.  Which is how I have been paying my rent and water bill (the water bill is even more bizarre... you put the money in an envelope and stick it in one of your neighbors' doors, and every few months they rotate who takes it to the water place).  I've never heard of just withdrawing $750 worth of cash and giving it to someone in an envelope, other than for under-the-table sorts of things.

I'm still not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with this ¥75000 cash.  After the "give it to the same ATM" line from above cycled about five times I just said I understood.  I figure I'll just take the money out, slap it down on the counter at the bank along with the bill, and say "I need to get this money to this company.  How do I do it?"  Playing the gaijin card! 

Shoe Sacrilege

Confession: I sometimes wear my outside shoes past the genkan, if I'm in a hurry and just need to grab something.  *Gasp!* Oh, the horror!  Taking off my shoes when I just need to grab something from the table?  A'int nobody got time for that!

Earthquake?

I experienced my first earthquake in Aomori!  ...And no one acknowledged it.  It was just a little bitty baby earthquake.  It only lasted about thirty seconds, and I might not have noticed it if I wasn't sitting still at my desk.  All of the sudden I felt a little off-balance and looked up to see the cord on the desk block phone swinging a little.  And then it was over and when I looked around, very few people seemed to have noticed it at all!  I heard two guys saying "地震？"　　"そうか。。。" ("an earthquake?"  "I guess so...") and that was all the acknowledgement I saw of it. 

I checked my earthquake radar immediately after and saw that it was a 5.0 off the coast of Hokkaido.  Glad to see that my radar updates as soon as it happens!