Moving (Happy Anniversary Me!)

As of today, I have spent 365 days in Japan. Where did the time go? Nobody knows. Since October, I have been keeping track of most events things I've been doing on my computer calendar. It's it's quite interesting to see what I've been up to for the last year. I guess it's true-- time does fly when you're having fun.

It's been about 3 weeks since I've moved into my new place. Now that things have finally settled down, in terms of lab work. I've got a little free time to post about the moving process.

We were officially tenants of our new place on the 18th of March. We rented an open back truck (one day for about $70 bucks) to load our goods and have it shipped over to the new appartment.

Oh I should mention a little about my roomies. One of them is Kuni, Japanese master's student the same age as I that went to Canada for a year. He speaks pretty good English just your all-round awesome good guy. My other roomie is Olympia from (dum dum dum) Calgary, who came to Japan to teach English and plans on staying over in Japan for a few more years before moving on to see other countries such as France. Now that I've introduced the cast a little (pictures another day), I'll post a bit about my moving experience.

Boxing match!

I started boxing my belongings the night before the move. Started at about 10:00 pm and kept going till about 3:00 am. The only real things I needed to box were my cutlary, spices and goods. Clothes went into suit cases, most large belongings had boxed they came in and I threw all of my smaller things into plastic bags.

Moving in; boxes all over the floor

Most of those were things scrambled all over the kitchen floor. For the most part, our kitchen looked something like this for about a week while we slowly started migrating our belongings into our respective rooms. It took about a few good evenings of work to get the boxes unpacked and put away. To be honest, not a whole lot of my stuff went into my room-- most of my stuff were cooking utensils so those were unpacked and stayed in the kitchen.

My room before

Actually this is a bit of a lie. This picture is quite similar to my room but it's actually a room from another unit within the building I took while looking for a new appartment. I didn't have an exact before picture of my room so I posted this one instead (note that the window is in a different position!)

The "after" picture!

The room was still quite bare after moving most of my basic belongings into the room. At this point I hadn't moved put my books away nor had the curtains in my room been installed. Of an interesting note, the rooms we had didn't come with light fixtures included. I spent a week using my heat dish and Chrismas lights to keep keep my room illuminated.

I have since moved all of my belongings into the room however and things are looking a little more cozy. The bed I have there, I bought from a other people that were moving out for $40, the desk and book case I got free from other people leaving Sendai.

The last day of my life in the dorms ended on March 31st. I had officially moved out by 1:00 pm after having my room inspected. Apparently the inspection people that came by were surprised at how clean my kitchen was that they asked me if I didn't cook. Well, that was sort of a back-handed compliment.



For comparison, this is what my desk looked like before and after moving out. Striking difference no? I spent an entire day on Saturday cleaning from about 10:00 pm till 5:00 am. I hucked lots of misc. things like quarter full bottles of soy sauce, misc dirty tupperware, left over sheets of paper, unused tissue paper and such. Felt kind of wasteful but it wasn't worth the effort to carry the stuff to the new place. Many kilos of garbage was thrown away.

I ended giving away atleast 5 kg of flour, several kgs of sugar, powered cream and much more to one of my friends in the dorm as a going away gift. Atleast 10 kg of cooking material (yeah, I had crap loads of stuff!)


Looks like I was never there!

After all the cleaning this what what my room looked like. It's kind of amazing, the difference. I have since returned to the dorms on a few occasion and noticed that a Chinese student had moved into the room. Perhaps I'll meet the guy one day.

This is Kuni, one of my roomies working in bed.

That's it for now!