Gettin Settled

So I moved out to my city, Kanazawa, on the Sea of Japan. The first day was a whirlwind of errands--getting registered with the city, opening a bank account, etc. My apartment is literally the smallest apartment I have ever seen. I think it might be a miniature scale model of the actual apartment I'm going to be getting at some point. It's like living in an RV, but not a fancy one. The apartment was stark empty when I got there, except for a futon mattress, so my supervisor drove me around town to equip the pad. Now I have a Japanese style table in the single room so I've been sitting on the floor.

I have a roach infestation. These are monster sized cock-roaches. Record-setting big. Of course, they seem even bigger relative to my doll-house sized apartment. I met the first of them when I came home the first time alone, sitting in my kitchen, greeting me, as if to say "Hello Stranger. What the hell do you think you're doing moving all this stuff into my place?" And then I crushed him. The first night I went to sleep without an alarm clock, worried I would sleep too late. That problem was of course solved when I woke up the first morning with a giant killer cock roach crawling on my arm. Please take a moment to imagine that...I jumped up, flung it across the room, and instead of it scurring away like a nice, small, American cock roach, it chased me around the room. In the end, however, it was the roach that suffered a crushing defeat.

Today's Japanese lesson:

• arigato-thank you
• awhellnah-this appartment is too small!