A change of address

Okay, so I've been a bit quiet lately...had a bit of a manic month with some crazy experimentation, combined with flat hunting in a foreign language, infused with Japanese Landlords general distrust of foreigners*.

*I'll tell you all about it later...when I've recovered from all this craziness

The gist of it is; we've finally moved house/flat/apartment/shoebox. It's a very nice area, quiet residential, with a 24hr supermarket about 2mins down the road, a bus route running outside our door, 7mins from the Metro, and most importantly (for me) cycling distance from Uni ..... *ahhhhhhhhhhhhhhh.....* saves me about 1 and a half hours a day....bliss.

We^ hired a van for the 23rd of Nov (a national holiday) and had spent the past week packing all the stuff in my room into boxes that we had gotten from the local supermarket. After filling two boxes it started to dawn on me (and Greg) how much crap I had managed to collect in a year.

^I say 'we', what I mean is that a very VERY nice friend of ours - AMY - asked an even nicer friend of hers - K1 - to use his superior Japanese skills to hire a van and then use his fantastic driving skills (he has his Korean Driving license converted to be used in Japan) to drive us and my junk through Tokyo.

It was a hectic day, we had to drive from Odaiba お台場　to Shinagawa　品川, to pick up a load of stuff from a friend who was moving out of Japan and thus donating us a fridge, washing machine, furniture, spare futon and most of the contents of her flat. THEN we were on to Shirakonadai 白金台　to pick up a sofa and some more furniture from Annalisa's apartment. This completely filled the van, so we headed to the new flat to wait for Greg who had to go off to the estate agents to sign the contract before we got to Annalisas...K1 and I carried on to drive to the new appartment, and had some lunch waiting for Greg to finish the formalities at the estate agents: he was apparently quite stuck, as it was all in japanese, until Rei turned up and saved the day...

We got the call from Greg, and then went to pick him up at the station, we also got hold of some lunch for Greg while we waited for him at the station.

Now armed with the keys to the flat (only one - because they hadn't changed the locks yet) we started to unload...we'd unloaded a couple of things and then the van started moving by it's own accord and slowly started to roll towards another parked van! I squealed from the back of the van and Greg jumped in to the front to pull on the hand brake...which was all rather exciting. Basically, we tried to get all the stuff from the van to the lift, then just dumped it in the flat. We then got back in the van to head back to Odaiba to pick up all my stuff still in my room (some of which still needed to be packed)

....it was getting late, and we were trying to wedge my bike into the van....we ended up killing most of my poor plants in the process...then we were back on the road (although I did manage to get us lost - I have NO idea how). We were a bit late in unpacking the second van load, but we did manage to get it all done, leaving me and Greg to move all the boxes up to our apartment...

There were a lot of boxes...