Monday

Another day, another series of events that makes me think that Japan is the most quirky place on earth. I head to work this morning, where I meet Yohei, Aya, and Ayumi on the bus. We all ride together to my workplace, where we sit in a room for a long period of time. Kimihiko shows up, and that's when we leave...

We drop Ayumi and Aya off at the train station, so Yohei, Kimihiko, and I go run around doing errands. Oh, so many errands. First we went to get my foreign registration card. Ofcourse, that requires a set of pictures, so we had to go get those too. Coming back, we wait and wait and wait, until finally they ask me for $6, then tell me to wait until February.

Next stop is the bank to set up an account so my work can pay me. But wait, before I get a bank account, I have to get a stamp for my name. See, in Japan, signing stuff means nothing, you have to have a tiny little stamp, which anyone can buy an exact copy of your's. Obviously they don't have my name in stamp form, unless I want one specially made for $70, so we select one from a wall that has two characters that somehow remotely sound like my name; A-Ru, something like that.

Stamp in hand, we go to the bank, where we fill out paperwork. A lot of paperwork. What made it difficult was that not only was it in Japanese, but I had to repeatedly write my address in Japanese, plus they kept on requiring crazy formats for the date. 2006 doesn't exist in this particular bank, as it does everywhere else in the world. No no, you need to put the year the emperor has been ruling for, so it's like 17 or 82 or something. I deposit a whopping $10 in my account, and they tell me that they'll mail everything to me. So much waiting.

Next, we go to find a cell phone. Now, I've really needed one since I still don't have internet in my apartment, because I need to email my parents to let them know I'm still alive. We go to Soft Bank, and it ends up they don't have contracts for the short period that I am going to be there. So we drive around, witness an intense car accident, and go to a shopping center. There, they talk Japanese really, really quickly around me, and I'm told to select a phone. Ahhh, Japanese phones. Does your phone have a 4 megapixel camera and flash? What about a GPS built in, where you can not only track yourself, but your friends too? A Japanese-English/English-Japanese dictionary? And so much more that I haven't discovered yet.

More talking, more paper signing, more stamping, and I have myself a phone. If you ever want to impress someone in Japan, sign something. It's great. Everytime I sign a document, in English, with my messy, looping cursive handwriting that's scrawled in .05 seconds, I get gasps of amazement. People not even with me, just standing near, would say things such as "cool," or "amazing." Yes. Yes it is.

It takes a while for the phone to be ready, so we eat, then buy some much wanted peanut butter. We pick up the phone, and head back to my office.

There, we again sit in a room and drink coffee for a while, watching some guy smoke. He then takes us around the building, introducing me to people that I still can't remember their names, and says that's it, he'll take me home. So he drives me home, I buy some bread to go with my peanut butter, and sit here about to have a sandwich with delicious nut milk. Mmmm.



ADDED: Oh, and having a middle name is awesome in Japan. It's so easy to confuse people. I have to write my information down on forms last name, first name, middle name. So at the bank, while waiting, this girl would periodically call me up for...pretty much no reason. She called me by my last name, plus -sama, which is the correct way (although -sama denotes that I'm in a higher position than her, which is a bit odd for me). Then the next time, she called me by my middle name plus -sama. She did that a few times, then suddenly switched to my first name and -sama. We placed bets on what she would call me next. Great fun.