Chores on a Friday?

It seems like this weekend was filled with all kinds of things that needed to be done. I know I'm jumping all back and forth through my adventures here in Japan but for I should get this down before I forget. It's only been about 36 hours but it seems like so much has happened. Let's start from the beginning.

Early Friday morning we made a list of important chores that needed to be done. Before you get all bored by me mentioning the word "chores", let me emphasize that this is not like taking out the groceries or shopping for trash or other things that you normal people do. No, these chores are less than ordinary, and even if they were ordinary they would still be hard because it's all Japanese.

Anyway, in an earlier posting I explained that we had our Alien Registration cards registered to our crappy guest house, which we thought was a really good idea (if you have no idea what I'm talking about see earlier post). Well it turns out that the Japanese administration is not as stupid as we figured. In fact, we learned that they are very compulsive on every little detail. Once we moved into our new place, we wanted all of our mail forwarded there instead of the guest house which of course our Alien Registration cards, bank and cell phones were connected to. Turns out, once we changed addresses we got a landslide of things to correct in order for things not to be more screwed up than they already are (mostly because our bank accounts are with Japan Postal Bank and they must have realized that we changed the address through Japan Post so they are now holding our cash cards hostage until we produce the proper papers! WTF!) We realized, eventually, that our cards needed to be re-registered in the district of our new address. It took a while but it ended up being a good walk from our place. The plan for the following week is to correct everything else.

Our new place, apparently, is just outside of the Kyoto registration regulations and, as such, we had to go to another ward and change our registration there. So what's the big deal? The place we had to go to for registration was outside all of the maps that we had the time. Everything we have is for the central Kyoto area (even though our place is on all our maps, we don't count as being in the centre). So we had to wing it trying to find this new administration building in the heart of suburban Kyoto. This is not an easy task as we had to rely on maps like this one randomly found in the street.

So you tell me, does this sound like an easy task? Well it ended up being a lot easier then it seemed. Yes, we got lost and it took all day but eventually we found the place. It's really weird, once we got outside of the central area, of course, there was less things in Romaji and more in Japanese characters. (By the way when I said things were not in English that wasn't exactly the whole truth. Things here aren't in English but you can read them. There are Japanese characters and there are Latin alphabet characters. Some things are written in both so at least I can read it, even though I have no idea what it means). Also, as we ventured further from the tourist areas we got more looks from people than ever before. I guess the suburbanites don't see many non-Japanese people. One situation comes to mind where we walked over to two ladies waiting for the bus. They had the look of dread in their eyes thinking we were approaching them and they feared that we would talk to them in NOT Japanese. Once we strung together our "where the hell are we?" question in Japanese, the look of relief on their faces was priceless because they could answer that.

Oh and on a side note, I can read one of the three alphabets. Currently working on #2. #3 has over 5000 characters.

On the way, more and more things started to pop out as being strange since they were geared to a different crowd than the central Kyoto people. Things like car ads and signs for Ikea.

It turns out that Ultraman is a proud sponsor of Honda. Ultraman is a Power Rangers type TV show around since the 1960's. They're still making new episodes and he is the biggest superhero in Japan, I think. He is super popular and somehow he is a major toy product. Everyone loves Ultraman.

Basic concept. A Godzilla (In Japanese Gojira) type monster comes down to mess with Japan, so Ultraman kicks his ass. That's pretty much every episode. In one of the department stores we visited, I found a complete collection of monsters from the Ultraman series. I'm serious when I say that this is a major toy.

After much searching, distractions and overall confusion we found the place for registration. Needless, to say it was fine. We did find a Pizza Hut on the way but it costs about $25 for one 3 toping pizza. That's lame in my book. I think the issue is cheese. It's hard to find it here and if I do it's expensive.

Tell me this doesn't look fun. ------>

A small add-on to this story. I realized after my freak-out a week ago I needed to find a gym or something. Sorry about that by the way. I thought it was worth mentioning to explain the situation. Things are a lot better. I got some sleep and things got a lot easier. Nonetheless, I was in search for some form of exercise that wasn't running. I couldn't get anywhere on the Internet since everything was in Not English. If there is a problem like this, we usually go down to the International House and ask the old volunteer women who work there. They may take forever and be hyper compulsive but they will find something for you on the far reaches of the city, which is what they did after an hour of searching. Anyway, I got wind through a source that there was a gym near enough to my house and after the grand adventure to get the new cards, we found the gym and I got a membership.

This leads into my Saturday story. What happens when you don't understand the transportation system and you have no map of the surrounding areas? Well you end up getting on a bus in the direction that you want to go and after an hour end up on the other side of the city. I was so pissed off and exhausted. Its hard enough to get me to go to the gym. It took me another hour around the board to get back to Go. Of course, this had to happen after I was already having a bad day.

Earlier, I tried using my boss' bike to get to the gym. Got half way there when I realized that the tire was getting flatter. Now, I'm not an idiot but after about 35min of screwing with the bike pump and tire, I couldn't figure out how to pump it up. It doesn't look the same as a regular tire. No. the Japanese have their own way of making tires apparently. Removable bike valves? Can someone explain this to me?

Anyway the pool and gym turned out great. There's even a nice Japanese trainer who speaks English. However, people were staring at me as if I had two heads. I guess they've never seen a person sweat so much before.

This a schedule of the classes the gym offers. I have no idea what they are.