Tweedles in Japan

The kids and I ventured out to the swimming pool last week.  It's about a half mile walk from our house.  I knew there wouldn't be older kids there since it was during school hours, but we were the absolutely only people there.  It was a little awkward, but the guards didn't seem to mind and tried to speak with us in broken English/Japanese.  It was interesting trying to figure out the rules.  You buy a ticket from a ticket machine.  Then take your shoes off in the genkan (all houses have these areas- it's where you leave your shoes), put your shoes in a bag provided, and then hand your ticket to the pool worker.  She gives you a locker key and you are free to go swim for 2 hours!  The pool was really nice and had a fast racing slide in the kiddie area.  We swam the entire time and had a blast.  We invented a new game that we call crab tag.  The kiddie pool is really big and shallow, so you can only use your arms to propel you in...

We went shopping yesterday with my sensei and she showed us the place to buy cheap snacks.  My kids spotted these Kirby Sodas and asked what they were.  She told us jelly soda.  Well, of course we had to try that!!  They were thick like jelly and had hard cubes of jelly in it.  It was sooo weird!!  The only bummer was that it must have had artificial sweetener in it.  My kids and I are sensitive to that stuff and we don't have to have much before we feel it.  But, we saved them for husband and when he got home he enjoyed the uniqueness as well! The other day we went to the school to register the kids.  The school is sooo big!!  G will be in grade 2 here and there are 5 classes of 27 kids!  We got to go on a tour of the school.  It's very old.  I'm pretty sure it only has squattie potties not western toilets so that should be interesting for the kids.  G has a friend from New Zealand in her grade alread...

This weekend we decided to go exploring to see what we could see.  We could totally have asked someone where the good beach is to swim at, but for some reason we just felt like exploring ourselves.  The beach is only about two miles from our house. But this was not the beach to go swimming at.  There was a lot of garbage on the beach and also lots of jelly fish.  We made the best of it and ate a picnic and walked and explored. And now we know where not to go for a beach day! Found this cemetery on our explorations and found it interesting. Eating has been the tricky thing here so far.  But these ice cream bars from 7-11 are our current obsession.  It almost makes up for the fact the 7-11 here don't have Slushies, but not quite. So yesterday I made a shopping list and meal plan and was determined to get what I'd need to cook some meals here.  The kids and I wore our backpacks and I prepped them they'd need to be patient w...

The only game I brought with me in my carry on was a new to us game called Ramen Fury.  Luckily it turned out to be a very fun game because we played it a lot in those first days before our stuff came.  (We have also eaten more ramen already than I'd had in my whole life in America.) Speaking of food, this is one of my new top favorite foods ever.  Shrimp and Mayo Onigiri.  We can walk to 7-11 from our house and pick up these yummy guys any time we want!  It's rice filled with shrimp and mayo and the wrapper technology keeps the seaweed wrapper separate from the rice so it doesn't get soggy.  G-love also loves onigiri, but her favorite is Kombu (seaweed). When we went to 7-11 last time we were surprised to be asked to stick our hand in a box and pull out 2 cards.  They turned out to be free drinks which they gave us right then!  We still have no idea why we won them, but cool! Another place we can walk to from our house is Donkey...

This is the front of our house. It is only 1000 square feet but a lot of people say our house is big!  This is our mail box and "bing bong" ; it is a camera with a speaker so inside our house you can see who it is and tell them to go away. The back of our mail box has a lock so people can't steal you mail. This is the back of our house, it has 2 balconies! And it has a faucet with a place too wash you feet or something like that. This is the giant slide at the park.                    There office suplies is so hi tech there is mechanical pencils that you shake up and down to get the lead out. You know how most mechanical pencils have 0.5mm or 0.7mm thick lead well here they   have 2.0mm tick lead as a size also. They also have a lot of  eraseible pens here too. And that is all the words I have to say so, bye.

Husband celebrated his 40th birthday Sunday!!  The kids and I were still pretty jet-lagged, but I think he had a good time.  We went out for breakfast to a really cool place that's easily walkable from our house.  It's a fabulous bakery with a dizzying variety of treats. We took a variety of things and just took bites of each so that we could try more things to figure out what we liked best.  G's favorite was some sort of soy sauce/egg/pancake.  Husband had to try the pizza with corn on it of course.  (Pizza being his favorite food)  My favorite was a donut filled with curry.  I would never have dreamed I'd like such a thing, but it was delicious! Little Buddy really liked this chocolate cream filled Koala.  Since we don't have any pots and pans or dishes yet it's really hard to eat at home.  We've been eating cereal out of plastic cups! haha!  But the hard thing is that it's also difficult for us to go out to eat s...

We were  so spoiled to fly business class all the way to Japan.  On the long flight (13.5 hours) we had these sweet cabins.  The chairs folded flat into beds.  We had huge tv's and could order food any time we wanted.  It was LEGIT! I'm not going to sugar coat the flight though.  Little Buddy started feeling sick to his stomach halfway through and was miserable for the remaining 14 hours of travel.  Thus, he made my life miserable.  he got airsick on our last flight and whined incessantly.  But, that's behind us now and we are excited to check out our new neighborhood. Due to jet lag we were awake at an obsurd hour so we went walking to explore.  There are three cool parks near our house.  The closest one has that gigantic slide I posted a picture of before.  The kids went down it lots of times even though it was wet from rain.  It's made of rollers (like on conveyor belts). This park with swings had a li...