Busy But

Usual day except...  Yesterday afternoon we ordered a wireless router online (via Amazon.co.jp) and they said the estimated arrival date is Wednesday.  We were surprised it arrived this morning!  And so we tried to hook it up to one of our fellow students' internet connection at his apartment and voila, we are able to access the internet from our own apartments nearby.  Unfortunately the distance plus the presence of so many walls significantly affects the wireless signal strength.  Our fellow student's apartment is on the first floor, and I'm 3 units to his right, one the 2nd floor of another building!  But to me it's better than nothing.  Now I can check e-mail and stuff (and send texts and maybe make phone calls) with just 1/10 the number of steps going to "my office" in school.  "Office" is the term everyone uses here to refer to our room of cubicles and desks and personal computers assigned to us.  When other people hear the word "office", they ask, "Office???  I thought you were there to study or to do research????"  What else would you call a place where you are assigned a desk and a computer?  Besides, we're doing school work and research work anyway! :-D

By the way, yesterday I received international money order from my mom sent through by my Tita Ondet in the US.  So this morning I went to the post office to have it encashed and... well they can't encash it, not at that branch.  It's just a small branch here in suburban/rural Atsugi.  They suggested I try the one near (urban/downtown) Hon-Atsugi.  Oh well.  The money could wait a little.  But it's good to know I have some extra to spend now.  I do have enough to cover for my expenses until my next "salary" (or "allowance") arrives which is not until June 21st.  13 days to go.

Anyway, if there's any other good to cooking, it's that I am able to delay my expenses a bit (i.e. the gas bill arrives later).  I am able to save now - I have less expenses, but as I said I will be paying more for the utilities later than if I were not cooking.  Then again, I really like eating Filipino food.  :-D

Oh and I had two trips to the post office area actually.  The first time I just went and tried to recall where it was by memory.  I failed!  Before going the second time around, I asked around and checked Google maps.  Bingo. :-D

Success?

Unfortunately no...

I got up early enough.  Had brunch of canned tuna and banana and my cooked rice.  Left early enough.  I got to the Minami-Rinkan station early enough.  I got to the Yamato Church early enough for the, supposedly 1:30pm mass, or at least according to this, this, this, and this.  Sigh, and I thought the Philippines was so behind when it comes to website updating.  I can't read Japanese but apparently the masses there are at 10:00, so that means I have to leave home 8:30am next time.  I have to look for another church to go to for my 2nd, 4th, and 5th Sundays of the month.  Well, I look forward to mass again in the Atsugi Catholic Church next week.  So...  No communion for me, but I resort instead to this for a homily.  It comes out a day late though because it's from a church in the US and it's already Monday here in East Asia when it is Sunday there and when the video comes out.

The area around the church and the Minami-Rinkan station is much like a developed sub-urban place ("probinsya," in Filipino colloquial terms), but it is just like Tokyo: mostly flat and mostly 2-storey homes and only a very small part where there are many commercial and tall buildings, very clean, well paved roads, disciplined pedestrians, very few moving cars relative to the number of people.  I saw a KFC there right outside the station.

Anyways, I was feeling tired so I decided to just go back to Atsugi.  I still have to buy groceries, and I wanted to look for an ATM machine where I can probably use my Philippines-based ATM card.  Could be expensive though.  My ATM card is Cirrus/Maestro/MasterCard affiliated.  I had no luck in downtown Atsugi; all the ATMs I saw there only accept Visa and Diner's Club and AmEx and some Japanese ATM networks.  I only discovered that there's a Burger King, Mister Donut, and Baskin & Robbins.

And then after dropping off my groceries at home, I went straight to school and had dinner here - my own cooked rice, and grilled squid and salad I bought at the grocery store.  And banana.  What a no-day.  But thankfully I am all safe and have something to eat.

By the way, I also subscribed to http://www.dailygospel.org/ so I regularly receive the daily readings. :-)

Ran Day

So this post is late again.  Strike two.

One good thing today: the weather was pleasant, sunny and clear skies, not so cold, just perfect "air-conditioner" weather.  Day-time high was ~19 degrees.

But it wasn't my day.  Now on to the bad stuff:

1. I woke up surprisingly very late - around 11am!  Apparently my alarm was set to alarm only on weekdays, I think.  Well actually it was good that I got some rest, but I might be late for the mass!  Then...
2. I missed the bus by a few (say 5) minutes, and the next bus would arrive not until after 30 minutes!  If only I were a few minutes earlier, I would have made it to the 2pm mass just in time, and maybe even slightly earlier!  So now I'm probably 35 minutes late!  Buses are 30 minutes apart on Sundays.  This was a day I wish I had already bought/gotten a bicycle!
3. Anyway, so what I did was, because halfway along the bus route to Hon-Atsugi, a second bus route comes along so the bus frequency increases (maybe every 10 minutes).
4. So I ran for 30 minutes to get to the halfway point of my bus route.  Alas, 5 minutes earlier, I saw the other bus line a kilometer away already.  Pointless running!?  Well, of course, the exercise was good, and as I said it was a pleasant day to be outside...
5. Problem was, I was not able to change shirts not until I got home...  Which caused a little sneezing.  (Just a little.)  And, this was the first time I was exposed to low humidity + cool temperature, and so it was also the first time I felt my lips really dry up!  But anyhow, good thing I had lip balm with me.
6. When I got to the church, I was probably 15 or 20 minutes late, it was homily already.  Guess what.  The mass was in Spanish!  That was bad, but not so bad, so I thought I had to worry about #1 to #5 above when in fact I was too early for the English mass!
7. So I asked one of the Japanese there "Eigo de kyo wa nan ji desu ka?" which literally should translate to something like "Today what time is in English?"  She checked and said "Kyo wa eigo de nai desu!" which meant "There is no English (mass) today!"  Argh!  So anyway, there I was in a Spanish mass in Japan.  I know some Spanish but it was still difficult to understand...  Oh well.
8. And then my computer just suddenly crashed.  I was working on something and then boom!  Blue screen of death.  I tried all sorts of things - starting in Safe Mode, etc, reinstalling the OS, and so on, but to no avail.  Goodbye, files.  Anyway, my diagnosis was that it was a memory problem, and surprisingly the onboard BIOS has a Diagnostics tool and it also made the same diagnosis....  
9. Sigh, no Skype date for tonight with Mara.  Actually I could use my laptop but because I did not bring it to school and it was getting late already, I thought I would just call it a night.  What a day.

Anyways, I also did what hopefully would be my last day for home-stuff shopping...  At Daiso.  Actually before going to Daiso, I went around this "department" store or mall where there's a shoe place, Eddie Bauer, Uni Qlo (apparently a popular Japanese casual clothes brand, like Gap), and many more.  There's this store that sells furniture, home stuff, some clothes, some school and office stuff - that I immediately fell in love with.  Japanese, minimalist design for everyday stuff.  Similar to IKEA, and I like IKEA, but I like that with this brand there is just one color theme, neutrals - white, wood/birch, silver, black - and so I don't have to mix and match and all that.  If I bought all my stuff from this store, I could achieve a really nice design for my interiors.  Of course...  The prices are generally on the expensive side, except maybe for some notebooks - comparing with those I found at the school store.  Or maybe I was looking at a different size that's why it was cheaper there than at the school store.  What is the name of the place?  I don't know, the store sign is in Japanese, but I think there's a branch of the store in Singapore but I forgot the name.  I think it's MUJI. :-)

Today also marks the first day I used my rice cooker.  The night before I asked for help from Kim-san, the Korean PhD student, on how to use it.

And also today I bought from the supermarket what looked like Yakitori, 6 sticks of it...  And then I found out that 3 out of the 6 sticks are all chicken skin and chicken fat.  Yummy but, unhealthy.  Oh well.  No, I didn't eat most of it.

The Trip Back to Atsugi

Here we go again.  Last time I did this, I got lost while dragging my 35 kg luggage around Shinjuku.  From Narita (the airport I'm headed for) there is supposedly a bus that goes straight to Atsugi, but because of the schedule of flights from Manila, I missed it.  So there I was, in Shinjuku, but thanks to helpful people I was able to make it to Atsugi - except that I wasn't able to contact the person I was going to meet.  So it was past 12 midnight, the place was deserted, and I was there by myself, getting lost for a while, but I didn't know if the person I was going to meet was going to find me.  Unfortunately my phone was not useable in Japan (it is a GSM-only phone; Japan's cellphone networks use CDMA), so I cannot make a phone call to my picker upper. I tried using the payphones but they were speaking in Japanese, I didn't understand what the instructions were as to how much coins I should put in.  I think I didn't even have enough coins, or that I lost some of them already trying to make a call.  And then, she showed up.  I left my Manila home at around 10:00am.  I got to my Atsugi apartment at around 1:00am.

Looking at the positive side, it was nice weather in Atsugi then, the perfect spring weather, like nature's own natural air-conditioning system was on.  And my free baggage allowance was just 20kg, but thanks to my connections, I was allowed 35kg without charge!  (This was not Philippine Airlines, by the way.)

So this time around, I'm a been there, done that.  Only problem is, since I was staying longer in Japan this time, my checked and handcarry luggage totaled 54kg!  And on paper, the allowable weight was only 37kg.  Thankfully the guy at the check-in counter said he will let me go with just a 10kg excess baggage.  Goodbye hundred-something dollars.  This is Philippine Airlines, by the way.  That's about all the trouble I had at the Manila airport.  Oh no, wait, I had to pay the Philippine Travel Tax of PhP 1620 - they say it applies to all tickets purchased online.  The inconvenience of going online!  What an irony.  And you wonder how come the Philippines is... nevermind.  I flew business class by the way, to get the heavier check-in baggage allowance.

And PAL's business class was spankin' hot!  Fully reclining seats, and 19-inch touch-screen LCD panels?  Wow.  I had a choice between a Japanese meal and a Western meal.  I chose the Japanese meal of course.  Yum.  Well, that's what you get for paying an extra...  $3.  Yup, I bought my ticket online, and it is just a one-way ticket because I don't intend on flying business class again soon, and the difference is just $3 (~PhP 150).  If I bought roundtrip tickets, the difference would have been around $200~$400, I think.

The plane take-off queue was so long at Manila, it took us probably more than 30 minutes from departure time before our plane actually departed, but like airlines do, we landed in Narita around 20 minutes ahead of schedule.  That would be around 7:35pm local time.  The straight bus to Hon-Atsugi (the main train station in Atsugi) leaves at 8:20pm.  I could make it in time!

Alas, when I got to the immigration counter, there was a problem with my visa.  It says "precollege (undergraduate) student" when in fact it should say "college (graduate) student"!  So they had to change it, blah blah blah.  Point is, I could've made it in time for the straight bus to Hon-Atsugi, but I didn't.  This time around, I was able to get on a bus to Sagami-Ono, which is just 5 stations away from Hon-Atsugi - no more Shinjuku!  That was so much pleasant a journey.  I got to Hon-Atsugi around 11:30pm, I think.

Actually, it wasn't so pleasant when I got to Sagami-Ono.  The bus stop was on the ground floor and the train station was on the second floor, so I had to go up one level.  Where we passengers got down from the bus, there seemed no option for elevators - just a long, 5- or 6-meter high staircase.  And then it was raining.  And very cold.  As in, around 5 degrees (celsius) cold.  Add some wind chill.  It felt practically freezing.  Quite literally.  No way I was going to take those stairs!

I actually noticed the elevator on the other side of the road, but there was a 2-foot high fence obstacle.  I chose to just carry my 42kg luggage over this 2-foot high fence and then take the elevator (and this is all protected from rain), than carry it under the rain 0.2m (stair thread height) at a time 30 times (number of steps)!

But when I got out of the elevator,  the problem was still there.  The rain and the wind chill factor.  My umbrella was deep inside my 42kg checked baggage.  And even if I was able to get it I would only be able to shield myself from the rain, not any of my bags.  Oh no, my electronics.  And if I still had to look for my umbrella, how long would that push me back?  Under that weather, all I wanted to do was get home.

Anyway, I just hurried to get to the station and nevermind the rain.  When I got to Hon-Atsugi, I needed to take a taxi to the school.  The last time, that someone who picked me up had a car to take me to my then apartment, and there was no rain!  And the rain and the wind chill I think rode with me on the train from Sagami-Ono to Hon-Atsugi.  Big problem.  Nothing else could go wrong?  Try this, there was a 20-party queue for the taxi.  Guess what.  In the rain.  I had no choice.

So finally I got to TPU at just a little past 12 midnight, the person who was to meet me, met up with me.  He introduced me to some of the researchers at the school, and then off to the apartment we go.  On foot.  Thankfully they lent me an umbrella.  When we got to the apartment, I forgot that my apartment was on the 2nd floor.  Have I told you I have a 42kg bag?  Well at least there were 2 of us this time to carry the bag one level up.  Obviously there aren't any elevators or escalators.

Anyway, finally I was in my apartment already.  maybe around 12:15am.  Everything is fine now; time to sleep.

NOT.

I forgot to ask my new friends how to operate the heater.  The controls were in Japanese!  I tried to figure it out but to no avail.  So I slept in 5-degree weather.  I wore a thermal underwear, two layers of sweater, I had a towel-like blanket (that's what they gave me), and a comforter/quilt.  I had difficulty sleeping at first.  I haven't eaten anything yet since that in-flight meal!  And it was soooooo very cold.  Last time I slept at around 2:30am.  This time though, I was too tired, and clocked out at around 1:30am.

Overall, except for the excess baggage (a.k.a. unplanned expense), visa issue, the rain, the rain, and the rain, and the really cold weather, everything was better this time around.  I was able to exchange text messages with my fiancée.  Yup, my phone is CDMA-capable!

One night only so far, this looks like an interesting 3 years.  Not to mention, my wife-to-be will be with me here witnessing one of my dreams coming true.  Of course, her becoming my wife this December is another dream I do not want to wake up from for eternity.  Ah, I am very sleepy now.  Good night to you all.