mi casa, casa castania

I’ll spare you the details of my apartment hunt, but running around while having a bunch of really bad headaches wasn’t all that fun. But at least I landed a nice room in Nakano through the great people over at Fontana - a few stops from Shinjuku or only one if you take the express train. It’s on the top floor, so the entire guesthouse complex is surrounded by balconies. There's a baseball diamond next door (where they not only play baseball, but i saw a firefighting squad doing drills- dragging the hose back and forth and aiming the hose at a large tarp.) I’ve got a pretty big room that's actually carpeted (very rare, though it'd be cooler if it was tatami floor). Its also got a walkout to a balcony, internet so i can inundate you with all my ranting, and even a heated toilet seat! (note to self: when i get my own house i will import toto toilets and get a korean construction team to install ondol in my house- that is if i'm not living on a tropical island)

So if anyone wants to send me fan mail, cards, gifts, large sums of money, etc. you can send them to:

D-rock
Casa Castania 601
1-32-5 Nakano
Nakano-ku, Tokyo 164-0001

I had the pleasure of meeting up with Ryan again, another Watson Fellow doing a similar project who i chilled with in Hong Kong. He's a few minutes away and he won't be leaving for vietnam until may 20th, so in he's remaining days we'll take tokyo by storm. wooord.

So i've overcome obstacle number one, now to get myself a cellphone. I could go the easy route and rent one, but that'd be too expensive. Then there's prepaid, which I can take care of but i want to get a deal through Yahoo! Auctions... but they require a gaijin card (a certificate of alien registration, you need it to do almost everything here as a foreigner). Then if I have a gaijin card, I could get a contract and get a phone for free (a super-pimped out phone compared to the prepaid handsets). So it's complicated. I went to register for a gaijin card, but I won't get the actual card until the 24th.. maybe i can just use the piece of paper with my gaijin number on it though. we'll see... too bad they just don't use sim cards here like 90% the world. Aiyaaa...