So, I foreshadowed future posts with my last post but nothing materialized out of that. I apologize.
My life is pretty boring which in my opinion makes my posts pretty boring. Producing boring content is not its own reward; it doesn’t matter how zen you think you are. On the other hand, it’s annoying when people are always asking me how I’m doing so I should probably try to post brief updates here from time to time. This is one of those times.
Instead of a small book of boring everyday minutiae, I’ll instead focus on the areas of my life which matter most to me.
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Last time, I was sitting in my hotel contemplating my return to Japan. This time, I’m going to talk about the following week and my adventures finding an apartment.
The Monday after I arrived I visited a realtors office so he could find me a place to live. I didn’t much care about size but I wanted a place close to work and good arcades. I work in Shinjuku and there’s a really good arcade in Shibuya so he ended up showing me a place in Shibuya and a couple of places in Shinjuku.
They were all fine but one of the places in Shinjuku was a block from work and came furnished so I went with that place. I spent a few days chilling and bumming about around Shibuya and other places in Tokyo. It’s pretty nice to be in this city and not have any obligations but I would be glad to return to work. It’s good to have a purpose in life.
In Japan, apartments have quite high move in costs. Not only is there 1 month rent agency fee and 1-2 months deposit but there’s also 1-2 months of key money (??) which is essentially a bribe to sweeten the deal for the landlord. This plus first month’s rent and stuff like lock changing fee and cleaning fee made me worried for a bit that I wouldn’t be able to move in as soon as I needed. In the end, everything worked out and I was able to move in.
In that time, I also went to the Tokyo Game Show with Hidde and spent quite a bit of time sleeping. In the near future, I’ll have a post about the former but probably not about the latter.
I’m going to begin a series of posts to map out my entry into Japan and anything else interesting happens while I’m here. Smaller updates get posted to twitter at http://www.twitter.com/melink14. In general, everything I do is low traffic since I’m pretty low key but the things I do post tend to be things that are hopefully a tad bit interesting.
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