What our apartment does when we're not around...

The screen fairy visited me again today while I was at work.

When I came home for lunch today, after being dutifully sent on my way from work by the Furubira noontime air raid siren, I thought I was hallucinating when I opened the window over my laptop and found a screen in it. I was pretty sure there hadn’t been a screen there before, but with all the multitude of sliding panels that make up Japanese windows, I couldn’t be certain that I hadn’t simply missed the screen in all my sliding about.

However, when I came home from work at the end of the day and found two sliding screens in the massive windows of my sun room, I knew for absolute certain that something was afoot.

WITNESS!

Fortunate for my paranoia, as I was standing before these new screens, looking part perplexed and part creeped out, a kindly face smiled up at me from the street below and gave a patented Japanese wavebow. I thanked him from above in my pidgen Nihongo, then rushed down to introduce myself and thank him properly with some omiyage from The Great White North.

His name was Kurokawa-san, and he was the somewhat gaunt, somewhat sunripened figure who I’d often seen labouring away in the workshop below my apartment. I’ll be sure to impart his life story to you once we’ve both had beer enough to improve my Japanese or his English.

The fact that he popped in some screens for me, without me having to ask him, is just another one of the reasons I’m so happy with my apartment. Though I pay far more for it than most of the other JETs who were sent to the Cold White North of Japan (meaning, I pay 50,000 Yen [500 Canadian beaver pelts] and most of them pay nothing, plus get a car, a bike, and anything else their heart desires), I can’t exactly complain about my accommodations. So, without further ado, here they are:

My bedroom, complete with Tatami mats

I seriously think I may need to marry these mats so I can take them with me when I leave.

My western bed. For all my talk of being hardcore and sleeping on the floor, I was VERY happy to see it when I showed up here my first night.

I can't explain how fun it is to be sleeping in this room. All Zen. All the time.

There's a tiny window at the end of my hall. I can't explain it, but it feels right.

The toilet's got its own room and its own slippers. It is also the only room in the house that you step down from the level of the hall to use.

For all my veneration of my tatami bedroom, I've relegated this smaller tatami room to the role of closet/storage.

Shower room! You could have a dance party in here...but I'm not sure if that would be good naked or bad naked.

Meet HAL 11,000: My Japanese Robot Light. He anticipates my every need by turning on as I approach and off as I depart. He even tries to show up other lights by brightening when they're on.

The hallway in my place is actually lower than the floors of all the other rooms, so you have to step up to enter the rooms...except for the toilet. You step down to use the toilet.

Kitchen + Bathroom Vanity - Oven = Meh, but it will do.

Entranceway. Notice the awesome slidiness and the lack of a real lock. I've had friends leave windows and doors unlocked for days at a time without having anything walk from their apartment.

My living room and sunroom.