A tour of our apartment

I know I've given a few video tours so far but for those of you who haven't seen our place yet, I thought I'd give a picture tour.

This is our apartment when you walk up from the street.  Through the front door is the lobby and then you take an elevator up to our floor.

Our floor is number 3 (the first balcony you can see here on the corner).  There are 17 floors total.  Floor 1 is the lobby and floor 2 is bicycle parking so we are on the first residential floor.

This is the view as you walk into our front.  To the right is the shoe closet and to the left is the toilet room.

Here is our closet full of shoes (and some umbrellas and stuff too).  It is against the rules to wear shoes inside the house.

Here is the toilet room.  In Japan, the toilet is separated from the rest of the bathroom.  It is an electonic toilet with a seat warmer and sorts of bells and whistles.  When you flush the water first goes through a faucet on top of the toilet where you can wash your hands while it fills the toilet bowl.

This is the view into our apartment once you leave the entryway.  First is the dining room then the living room and finally the kids room.

To the right of the dining room is the kitchen.  It's pretty small but at least we have an oven this time!  And a dishwasher too, although it's about the same of milk crate.

Going past the kitchen you go down a hallway to the bathroom and the master bedroom.

The bathroom is divided into 2 parts - the outer area with a sink and vanity (and also a washer/dryer behind it) and then further into the bathroom (behind the privacy glass door you see here) is the shower room.

The washer/dryer.  Again, everything is on a small scale.

This is the shower room, which is hands down my favorite part of Japanese living.  This room is totally waterproof, so whether you are taking a bath or shower, it doesn't matter and the bathtub has no overflow drain so you can literally fill it to the top (if it overflows it goes into the shower drain).  The faucet is controlled on the wall with a display where you can choose the water temperature and how far to fill the bathtub.

This is the master bedroom

This is the view from the living room.

This is the kids room with all their futons put away.  At night they open up their closets and unfold their Japanese futons.

Plum grove - Dec 13th

This Saturday, Chad had a cold so we went somewhere fairly close - the Plum grove.  First we started out the day at Starbucks, then headed on the train one stop to Taura (where we used to live).  From there we walked to the entrance of the park and then hiked on up (it's quite a hike uphill), this week the kids did much better - no one had to be carried!  Once we were there we had a picnic and the kids played on the nearly empty playground for a long time.  I have so many pictures of Tristan because he had me watch him do all different things from one end of the playground to the other.  Of course the other kids had a blast too and we even timed how fast they could do the whole course.  When we were done there we went up into the observation tower where once again we could see the "whole world".

Kamakura - Dec 7th

Last Sunday we decided to spend the day at Kamakura.  First we took the train and walked up to the shrine.  After looking around and getting a fortune, we walked through the Kamakura street market where we bought a fried potato patty (it was like a hashbrown but with a panko breading and it was made from purple potatoes) - very good!  We then took the electric line train to another part of Kamakura where we walked down to the beach and let the kids play for about an hour in the sand.  There was a sailboat race going on and Chad was thrilled to watch part of it.  After that we walked to the Great Buddha where Chad took Abby and Tristan inside of it.  The interesting thing about the Great Buddha was that it used to be inside a large temple but a tsunami destroyed it (the temple) about 500 years ago.  Maybe I learned this last time but just didn't pay much attention.  Anything that involves a tsunami certainly peaks my interest now, especially all the tsunami evacuation routes that they have posted.  On the way back we decide to walk the whole way along the beach instead of taking the electric train.  We accidentally passed the turn to go back to the JR train station and once again we had some tired, whining children.  Tristan was up on Chad's shoulders and I gave Abby a piggyback ride for a bit.

Waiting for the train

Jamie's buying a candy dipped grape.

All the kids decide to get one!

I believe this was a wedding going on.

This was the fortune I bought.  In order to get the fortune I had to shake a box full of wooden sticks until one came out a small hole. The attendant looked at the number on the stick and then gave me the fortune that corresponded to it.  Apparently I have good luck :)

And apparently you have to tie your fortune here if you want it to come true.  You can see that all the English ones are pink.

We had to get a picture of Flat Stanley with us. (It's a school project)

You can see the shrine up on the hill in the background.

You can see on the map that all the tsunami evacuation places are marked with a wave symbol (some of these are simply tall buildings)

Lots of fishing boats down on the beach