Life after Tokyo

Instead of giving a painful detailed account of my first moments in kasukabe, I will show you these pictures.

Below is the first meal I cooked in my apartment. Broccoli and cauliflour of course! Broccoli is very common here but cauliflour is rather hard to find. I've only even seen it at one store. It comes in very small heads and I find it is not really worth it the money to buy it.

I think my apartment had been cleaned before I arrived however, it was still really dirty. One of my first orders of business was to buy whatever cleaning implements I could and scrub everything. For example, the picture below is the sponge I used to scrub the kitchen shelf. It was covered in a stick grime, as if it hadn't been cleaned in 20 years... Ugh.

I did the deep cleaning in stages. The next thing I attacked was the shower/bathroom. Luckily scrubbing bubbles is available and relatively cheap in Japan. That's what I used to clean my shower. It was not completely effective though because there was tonnes of mildew remaining on the wall. To clean that I needed kabikiller. In other words... Bleach. I bought some kabikiller (bleach) and it very effectively removed the mildew but I also got some burns around my nose from inhaling all the bleach... Not fun. Hopefully it will never be that again. Japanese cleaners are very strong. One of the other ALTs that arrived with me got burns on her hands from cleaners... That's why you see in the picture I'm wearing gloves.

These pictures are from the funagawa fireworks in Tokyo. They were the last fireworks of summer. There were actually two sites where they were setting off fireworks. The whole thing lasted for about 1 hour. It was gorgeous!!

I went to the fireworks after going to BBoy Park, a big break dance jam that was held in Yoyogi Park in Tokyo. My friend Natsumi and I went with one of the tokyo Bboys I met when I first arrived in Tokyo.

More later :)