The Weekend Off, and Journey to Yokohama

Hellooo again!

Be ready for some pictures! (if you didn't already know, you can click the pics for full size images)

For the weekend off, I mostly just hung around and went down to the station a couple times. On the way down, once, a couple of us walked through the park to see a local shrine.

To the left is the entrance to the park.




















There's also a picture of me there in
the park, just for good touristy measure.


















































Here you wash before you enter the shrine:




























These are from random pictures once you go inside:





















































We saw a wedding about to take place while we were there, and many people had brought their babies to be blessed.















It was a rainy day, but it was still beautiful and quite peaceful. I wanted to take a walk into the actual park, but we still had some shopping to do, so we moved on.












Over all, even though training was long, I had a good time in Omiya. The group we had for training was great, we all got along really well and we hope to stay in touch in the future. There are a couple people particularly near my new location that it would be fun to keep hanging out with. We shall see. It would be nice to have someone to venture around Tokyo with.

I also have to check out the local 'foreign lounge' apparently you can go there and get hooked up with foreigner services like translators and Japanese lessons. The lessons I've looked into are about 100 yen a class. Heck yes! I'll be taking twice a week! Woot!

I'm also looking into finding a church to go to around here, but I've just arrived in Yokohama, and I don't really know how to use the train yet, so I think it may be a little bit before I'm venturing too far off.

On that note, Here are some pictures of my new apartment...

That is looking through the apartment from right inside the door. Immediately on the left (out of the picture) is the WC, on the left (in the picture) is the bathroom with the tub and shower, on the right there you see my toaster oven on top of my little fridge, and then past that the sink and stove, then past that the washing machine, then through the door my room.

It's really quite cozy and very new. The floors are wood and all the doors are wood, except the door to the shower. They all smell like new wood too, which is nice. Everything is quite clean. They considerately found me some gently used storage drawers and a few little stands and assorted things for storage. Over all I like my apartment very much. Now that I've unpacked, it feels like its mine. I know that I may freak out a little when I'm out walking around, not knowing where I am, or why the crap I'm in Japan, or who I'm going to talk to......hahaha.....I know that when I get home to my apartment, I'll feel better.

Here are some more detailed pictures for your enjoyment...




















































































This panel is on the wall outside my bathroom, you can press the button and choose the temperature of your water. It talks you you too (inside and outside of the bathroom...since there's a panel inside too) but I have no idea what it says, or what it's really capable of, since I can't read the buttons. Hahahaha.













Today, I had the day off, so I walked around town a bit. I took some pictures of my 'neighborhood' and around town a little but posting pictures on here, and getting them to align and in the right location is difficult, so I'll leave that for another post tomorrow.