A few weeks ago I moved out of my house in Iwaki, Fukushima and loaded the car with every earthly possession I have in this country to start my life as a volunteer and traveler (aka a vagabond). At first things seemed to be going quite well, the new building had been chosen for the shelter, designs were being made on how to convert the place into an amazing animal sanctuary, and the final date had been chosen. Then came the realization that buying property in Japan as a foreigner is no easy task, and is made even worse when trying to do so for a pet shelter.
First we were turned down by our top choice because they did not want to sell to foreigners, then at the next place the local farmers said they were worried the cats would pee in the lake (what?), and lastly, the homeowner decided to ignore us and the agent about finalizing anything. So the move in date came and went, and we are still stuck paying rent every week when we should have been settling in our rescues as I speak.
Sometimes being a foreigner in Japan is just terrible, no one listens to you and every now and then, locals are scared of you. It's as if they think we are some sort of alien life form.
Anyone have any tips on how to raise money for our next few rents and/or how to speed up the contract process in Japan? I am getting sick of mostly living out of my car.
Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Showing posts with label moving. Show all posts
Monday, April 29, 2013
Friday, March 15, 2013
Moving On
I have been quite terrible at keeping this blog running, and really only have myself to blame for that, but felt the need to comment about the life changes that are about to happen for me.
In a little over a week, my job as a kindergarten teacher will come to an end, it breaks my heart to leave these kids, because they've really become my kids over the last 12 months, but I must. The next chapter of my life is waiting to begin, and that chapter is looking to be amazing.
You see, after this I will finally have enough money saved up to volunteer full time in Japan and to also travel the world a little bit. So while I have to leave my children behind, I will finally give the disaster animals the time they deserve and the look at the world I've been dreaming of.
I promise that this blog will be becoming far more active as this new chapter starts.
In a little over a week, my job as a kindergarten teacher will come to an end, it breaks my heart to leave these kids, because they've really become my kids over the last 12 months, but I must. The next chapter of my life is waiting to begin, and that chapter is looking to be amazing.
You see, after this I will finally have enough money saved up to volunteer full time in Japan and to also travel the world a little bit. So while I have to leave my children behind, I will finally give the disaster animals the time they deserve and the look at the world I've been dreaming of.
I promise that this blog will be becoming far more active as this new chapter starts.
Thursday, April 12, 2012
さようなら 富士山
Two weeks ago, David and I moved from Minami Alps, Yamanashi to Iwaki, Fukushima to get a pay raise and be closer to volunteering at Japan Cat Network.
Things have certainly not gone as expected since arriving.
David's job fell through last minute, so he went from having his dream job to working part time as a preschool teacher, I discovered my job was not what was originally described to me (still seems fun, but rather bummed), and we have so far not been able to volunteer much.
The worst part though is how much I am missing my students. It feels like there is a big void in my heart without them. I miss teaching them, making lesson plans, seeing Fuji from the classroom window, getting harassed during my down time, and I deeply miss being called 紅茶 先生
Thank God I thought about giving the kids my e-mail address before leaving, it really makes the day seem infinitely brighter when a message from them pops into the inbox. Especially when they write in broken English or talk about how sad it is to not have me as their teacher. For a year, I called them "my kids," but I didn't realize how true that was until I had to leave them behind.
P.S. on the plus side, we are fostering cats named Ham and Egg. They're pretty awesome, and sound like cars when they get excited.
Things have certainly not gone as expected since arriving.
David's job fell through last minute, so he went from having his dream job to working part time as a preschool teacher, I discovered my job was not what was originally described to me (still seems fun, but rather bummed), and we have so far not been able to volunteer much.
The worst part though is how much I am missing my students. It feels like there is a big void in my heart without them. I miss teaching them, making lesson plans, seeing Fuji from the classroom window, getting harassed during my down time, and I deeply miss being called 紅茶 先生
 |
| Ni-Nensei after closing ceremonies |
Thank God I thought about giving the kids my e-mail address before leaving, it really makes the day seem infinitely brighter when a message from them pops into the inbox. Especially when they write in broken English or talk about how sad it is to not have me as their teacher. For a year, I called them "my kids," but I didn't realize how true that was until I had to leave them behind.
P.S. on the plus side, we are fostering cats named Ham and Egg. They're pretty awesome, and sound like cars when they get excited.
 |
| oh and Egg sleeps in a TV |
Sunday, April 3, 2011
The Trek From Hell
Moments after leaving the Narita airport to begin our trek to our works office to get directions to the training site, it dawned on both of us that someone (me) had packed way too much and that this was going to be a very tiresome journey. Thankfully though, the start of our trip was a 90min bus ride to Omiya, followed by some very nice HS students helping us find the correct route to Borderlink, while giggling every time I told Debu to shut up about how I packed to much, so that was not too horrible. On top of that, Debu, being the amazing boyfriend that he is, carried my biggest bag for me.
Anyways, after a grueling trek to the office, we came to discover that that grid of Omiya was in the middle of a black out,* so I got to watch the luggage downstairs while Debu trekked up the pitch black stairwell in search of directions... it wasn't so bad waiting though, because during that time I got to see a bunch of Japanese office workers making ghost sounds and waving their flashlights around, which was quite adorable. Also during my time as luggage watcher, another man with a giant backpack came up and asked if I was there for Boderlink, and it turned out this random man was a fellow ALT who had actually been here when the quake happened and had decided to stay to continue his contract as a teacher, which I highly commend him for, since so many fled. He told me about how it was one of the scariest moments in his life, and how even though he was far away in Tokyo, it was still strong enough to give him horrible motion sickness, but the worst he said was the constant aftershocks that occurred.... the ground seemed to never stop shaking. Since he was also heading to the training facility, the three of us decided to travel together, and thank God for that too, because he helped carry my immense amount of luggage, and I am pretty sure that if it had just been the two of us, we would have never made it.
And so the trek from Hell truly began... for starters, we found out that to get to the training facility, we would have to travel back to the station that we had originally arrived at (oh joy), and then make two separate train transfers. This journey was made into an even larger issue due to the power conservations, which meant all elevators and escalators were turned off, and Japanese train stations have many, many, stairs in them, oh and by the way, two of our suitcases weighed about 70lbs each. Yea, this was going to be good. Thankfully, there were quite a few people who went far out of their way to help us get to our destination, including an engineer who was learning English to go to Europe and get women, and a 60yr old man who randomly grabbed my 70lb suitcase and just lugged it up a flight of stairs for me, but even with these advantages, it was still incredibly tough going, and it took multiple hours to make our way from Omiya to Kazo for training. By the time the three of reached our end destination, we were exhausted, sweaty and about ready to collapse. Needless to say, I bought the guys dinner as a thank you, and we celebrated the end of our long day at a local Okonomiyaki** place and a few cold beers.
*A lot of areas in Japan have been doing scheduled rolling black outs to try and conserve as much energy as possible after the disasters so that it can instead go to more necessary things then elevators and flashy billboards
**an Okonomiyaki is basically a Japanese pancake with anything you want mixed into it, for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki
Anyways, after a grueling trek to the office, we came to discover that that grid of Omiya was in the middle of a black out,* so I got to watch the luggage downstairs while Debu trekked up the pitch black stairwell in search of directions... it wasn't so bad waiting though, because during that time I got to see a bunch of Japanese office workers making ghost sounds and waving their flashlights around, which was quite adorable. Also during my time as luggage watcher, another man with a giant backpack came up and asked if I was there for Boderlink, and it turned out this random man was a fellow ALT who had actually been here when the quake happened and had decided to stay to continue his contract as a teacher, which I highly commend him for, since so many fled. He told me about how it was one of the scariest moments in his life, and how even though he was far away in Tokyo, it was still strong enough to give him horrible motion sickness, but the worst he said was the constant aftershocks that occurred.... the ground seemed to never stop shaking. Since he was also heading to the training facility, the three of us decided to travel together, and thank God for that too, because he helped carry my immense amount of luggage, and I am pretty sure that if it had just been the two of us, we would have never made it.
And so the trek from Hell truly began... for starters, we found out that to get to the training facility, we would have to travel back to the station that we had originally arrived at (oh joy), and then make two separate train transfers. This journey was made into an even larger issue due to the power conservations, which meant all elevators and escalators were turned off, and Japanese train stations have many, many, stairs in them, oh and by the way, two of our suitcases weighed about 70lbs each. Yea, this was going to be good. Thankfully, there were quite a few people who went far out of their way to help us get to our destination, including an engineer who was learning English to go to Europe and get women, and a 60yr old man who randomly grabbed my 70lb suitcase and just lugged it up a flight of stairs for me, but even with these advantages, it was still incredibly tough going, and it took multiple hours to make our way from Omiya to Kazo for training. By the time the three of reached our end destination, we were exhausted, sweaty and about ready to collapse. Needless to say, I bought the guys dinner as a thank you, and we celebrated the end of our long day at a local Okonomiyaki** place and a few cold beers.
*A lot of areas in Japan have been doing scheduled rolling black outs to try and conserve as much energy as possible after the disasters so that it can instead go to more necessary things then elevators and flashy billboards
**an Okonomiyaki is basically a Japanese pancake with anything you want mixed into it, for more info: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Okonomiyaki
Wednesday, March 30, 2011
The Big Move
It has been a little over a week since David (whom I know sometimes call Debu thanks to a joke during training), and it has been so incredibly hectic that I have barely even had the time to sit down and tell my loved ones that we are alive, let alone write an entry trying to detail everything, but now that we have moved into our apartment, there's a bit of down time... so I shall try my best to sum up what has occurred the past week and the amazing things we have seen.
So it all began last Monday morning around 4:30am (EST) when we arrived at the airport to begin or trek across the world... the airport portions were quite uneventful, minus the TSA breaking a zipper on my bad and Debu being lucky enough to manage to sleep most of the time. The flight to Japan was long, and mostly boring, Debu spent a good portion of the flight doing a combination of sleeping and talking to the 4yr old Japanese girl sitting in front of him, while I attempted to sleep and watched many in-flight movies. Due to the nuclear issues occurring in Japan, we had to take a slightly different course, which ended up being pretty cool since we flew over Alaska and Russia
Then finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we were actually in Japan! The only highlight there was that I left a bag behind in luggage claim by accident and when I went to retrieve it, there was literally 10 guards protecting it and they were all incredibly polite and quite concerned, this was mostly hilarious because Debu and I had been joking for weeks that if someone dropped anything in the street that a policemen would be standing guard until the owner eventually came to retrieve it. This had me laughing hysterically for quite awhile since it was just so funny to see an entire station of people working to guard one single bag.
Now, I shall leave you with a view of Fuji-san from our apartment
So it all began last Monday morning around 4:30am (EST) when we arrived at the airport to begin or trek across the world... the airport portions were quite uneventful, minus the TSA breaking a zipper on my bad and Debu being lucky enough to manage to sleep most of the time. The flight to Japan was long, and mostly boring, Debu spent a good portion of the flight doing a combination of sleeping and talking to the 4yr old Japanese girl sitting in front of him, while I attempted to sleep and watched many in-flight movies. Due to the nuclear issues occurring in Japan, we had to take a slightly different course, which ended up being pretty cool since we flew over Alaska and Russia
Then finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we were actually in Japan! The only highlight there was that I left a bag behind in luggage claim by accident and when I went to retrieve it, there was literally 10 guards protecting it and they were all incredibly polite and quite concerned, this was mostly hilarious because Debu and I had been joking for weeks that if someone dropped anything in the street that a policemen would be standing guard until the owner eventually came to retrieve it. This had me laughing hysterically for quite awhile since it was just so funny to see an entire station of people working to guard one single bag.
Now, I shall leave you with a view of Fuji-san from our apartment
Monday, March 7, 2011
two weeks left
There is just slightly under two weeks left until my boyfriend and I leave for Japan, and today I went through the first very hard step towards doing so, I moved out of my place in Richmond VA and back in with my parents to spend the last few days with them. The going away party was wonderful, the two weeks leading up to it were touching and the packing process took much longer than expected, I did quite well about not getting emotional too, until I looked around and saw the empty bedroom... the tears were flowing openly and it was quite difficult to not just get back into bed.
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