Category: experiences

Day by day, I’m getting more and more used to my new house and the neighborhood. Since the move, I’ve had to adjust a few of my routines – and I don’t mean the new ones involving Pumpkin. As weird as it may sound – after all, I moved less than 5 km – but life does feel different here.

First, it’s so much more quiet, but in a neighborhood without through traffic, this is to be expected. Now I’m enjoying the quiet after dark, and I even go to bed relatively early these days. Of course, it’s still very cold, so there’s that; I’ll probably return to my night-owl ways once my house isn’t freezing cold in the nights anymore.

Second, I now know my mail man! He usually comes at around 10:30 every day, so it’s easy to stop him on the way. Since there is still the old nameplate at the door (I’m working on it…) I had to explain the new resident situation again. I’m not receiving any mail for my company, which will be a problem once tax season arrives… Anyway, I never received much mail, and there are far fewer ads coming (mostly for food and takeout), so he’s passing me by most of the days. Dear friends: Send more letters!

Third, I needed to get used to a new garbage disposal schedule. Garbage days are the same as before, but in the old apartment, I could bring my garbage down to the collection whenever I wanted, and the management would put it out on the appropriate days.

Now I have to do this myself on the very day (and not the evening before), and what’s worse: The collection is quite early in the morning. Twice already, I watched the garbage truck pass by, bags in hand… As long as it’s winter, that’s not a big deal, I’ll just store the bags another week. But in summer that is not advisable. We’ll see how the early rising will go then.

So yes, lots of new routines. Who would have thought…

It’s really cold in Kyoto right now. I’m sleeping with two sweaters and woollen socks because I feel chilled even underneath my thick woollen duvet with extra blanket on top. The house is so much colder than the old apartment; today I woke up to 4 degrees.

Also, it’s snowing again. In all my years in Kyoto, it has never snowed so often and so much as this winter. Of course, I still love the snow, but the novelty wears off quite quickly to be honest. It snowed all afternoon yesterday and all through the night, and it’s still snowing right now. This is my garden this morning at 8:30 am.

Pumpkin is not amused about the temperatures. He loves watching the birds outside, and I think he understands that they are freezing even more than he does. Right now he sits on my lap, purring, happily keeping me from work. I’ll have to relocate him soon…

One thing you’ll find out very quickly when you have to move is: You have a lot of stuff. Possibly even way too much. My personal “way too much” is paper. Not paperwork or books, I don’t even dare mention these. I’m talking about plain, white, as yet unused paper.

This is all the paper I brought with me on my move: notebooks and booklets of all sizes. Large notepaper left over from my uni days, bound and unbound. Small loose sheets for taking notes by the phone. Tiny scratch pads for jutting down ideas on the move. One ream of printer paper for the office and another stack twice as high of old, one-sided printouts that can be reused. Just like the big old envelopes I have cut up for this purpose. There is also a collection of cardboard in all sizes, to reuse in art projects.

What is not there are my post-it notes in multiple colours and sizes (of course) and my collection of postcards and writing paper and corresponding envelopes. They form their own special mount doom upstairs.

Altogether, this was two moving boxes full of paper. With nothing written on it because partially used notebooks are elsewhere yet.

Do you think I have a problem?

Just checking in to tell you that all is fine over here. I’m just super busy, trying to do 5 things at the same time….

Next update coming soon!

Time for celebrations – I got my second Corona shot yesterday afternoon! I was fine yesterday evening and today as well, but now I’m working up a bit of a fever. Nothing serious – yet – so I’ll just put myself to bed with some hot tea and my grandmother’s sure-fire cure for colds. I’m sure I’ll be fine again tomorrow.

I’m glad I am finally fully vaccinated, there were some bumps on the road initially. As mentioned before, I registered for my shots in the beginning of July and expected a quick turnaround. Unfortunately, there were supply problems, so Kyoto Prefecture stopped all vaccinations for about 3 weeks. So, my first appointment was only on August 14.

But once the schedule was fixed, everything went smoothly. We were asked to arrive 10 minutes early, and then we were taken through the procedure in small groups of 4 people to minimize waiting time. There were 6 stations for my first shot, and 5 for the second one (no need to make another appointment), from name taking to health checking to the actual jab.

Excepting the waiting time before and after, the whole procedure took only 10 minutes. Everything was super organised, the volunteers – many students but also adults – were very friendly and patient, and I felt well taken care of. Japan for the win!

Anyway, not much is going to change with respect to masks and other restrictions. With relatively low vaccination rates (some 40% have received both, 50% only one shot) and the delta variant breezing through the country, we’ll be lucky if there’s no further lockdown, pardon me: state of emergency. I’m not very optimistic though…

Anyway, off to bed with tea and a book. See you soon!

Wow, I’m still swamped with work. A number of new projects that I’m involved in have started and we’re still kind of feeling our way through them. Then I have daily meetings where I have to out of the house *gasp* every day until next Tuesday, which will not help with the workload. And on top of all that are a number of private emails I have to answer and most of them are going to be pretty long. How is it that there’s nothing much for weeks and then everything happens at the same time? Standard work conditions for the self-employed I guess.

So, sorry for another super short post where I’m essentially telling you that not much is happening.

But: big things are afoot. Really big things, and I think I’ll be able to share them with you in a couple of weeks, if everything runs smoothly. So, bear with me for a bit longer, please.

It’s a very cool August in Kyoto, much more so than usual. It’s been raining almost every day now, sometimes very heavily. Although this is the start of the typhoon season, there is no typhoon in sight right now. To me, the whole year seems to be more rainy than usual. Back in May we already had several weeks of rainfall when it used to be pretty sunny. And then of course the normal tsuyu – rainy season – kicked off in June just like every year.

Kyoto city has been taking the rain relatively well as far as I know, but in other parts of the country, the rainfall caused floodings, landslides, and a number of people were killed already. Let’s hope it doesn’t get any worse. While I like the cool weather right now – I don’t enjoy being drenched in sweat for months – I hope that this is not a foreboding of a chilly winter. Or something even worse…

No doubt what’s going on. Global warming (aka climate change) is real, and we’re feeling it already. So: turn off your lights (and your aircon) if you don’t need it, leave your car in the garage and ride your bicycle or the bus and let’s do something about this! Yes, we can! 😉

I’m pretty happy living in Japan. Things go smoothly, and although most people don’t speak English (or don’t dare to even though they understand), they are very helpful throughout. But every now and then, things go wrong – annoyingly so.

About three months ago, I got a letter from my bank asking me to check and update the details I gave them when I opened my account. They do this every now and then because you must be a resident to have a bank account. It shouldn’t be a big deal. This time, I had to go to the bank anyway and thought I could take care of this in the branch instead of online. So, I handed in my letter, my ID and bank card to a clerk and was asked to wait. For a long time. 30 minutes. At the end of which I was asked to please go online and do it myself.

I was rather annoyed. Not because of the answer as such, but because she wasted my time. Surely, figuring out that she can’t do that for me doesn’t take half an hour? Of course, in Japan, getting loud doesn’t get you anywhere. The only thing it accomplishes is that they stop talking and at the end of your rant simply repeat what they told you in the beginning – an excellent strategy by the way. So I simply told the clerk that I was annoyed with her wasting my time. She apologised – what else was she supposed to do – and I left – what else could I do.

In an attempt to get all passive-aggressive, I waited until a couple of days before the deadline to go online and fill in the form. I thought I had cooled down sufficiently to deal with it but no – more obstacles. The form, while technically rather easy to deal with, is entirely in Japanese. Not even furigana so I could decipher the kanji more easily. Just to make this clear: This is not a form that any Japanese ever has to fill out, it’s exclusively for foreign residents. Thankfully, google translate does help with a bit of copy/paste and it took me a mere 20 minutes to fill everything in. All is good.

Or so I thought.

Because just the other day, I received another letter asking me to fill in the very same form from 3 months ago. What? I have no idea what’s going on. Either I made a mistake, which is entirely possible because there is no real right or wrong answer to “what are you going to do with your account” (with the possible exception of “use it to launder money for the Yakuza”). Or, another possibility is that some smartass actually looked at my answers and saw that the first deadline was just before my visa renewal date and he wanted to make sure I’m still in the country because that’s what the whole form is good for.

So, I’m back to square one. Dear Bank of Kyoto – when it comes to passive-aggressive, you win. Hands down.