News from Japan

Oh my gosh! We made it. The flight didn’t seem as long as it was until we hit Tokyo. That was when we realized how late it was – just about midnight. We went through all of the immigration and customs stuff and went through 3 more security checks, and then on to the next flight. It was impressive how quickly they moved a LONG line of people.
Charles Barton, headmaster, and John Gaylord, Elementary/MS principal, met us at the airport in Nagoya and took us to our home. We, of course, automatically stepped to the passenger side. Oh well….It was well after 3:00 am when we finally arrived at our house.

The house! It’s truly magnificent. After we had been warned on numerous occasions to “think small” and that there really wasn’t anything in the way of room in a Japanese house, we are positively in the lap of luxury! It’s fabulous. Here’s a description to go along with the pictures (yet to be posted). The carport is the smallest little carport you’ve ever seen – just barely wide enough for the car to fit (don’t even think about putting the van in it). If you’re not careful, one side or the other is completely blocked. We have a cool little gate that opens up to a concrete with small rocks path up to the front door on the left side of the house. The lawn is our front yard and it’s huge. It’s quite overgrown and what passes as grass here is actually a wide variety of weeds that are cut down to grass level with the smallest lawnmower you’ve ever seen (it’s about 1m wide at the most). Jeff has already planned his deck to wrap around the house to connect the two sliding glass doors that open up 30cm above the ground……..I’ll be happy just to get the weeds mowed down. The doorbell is actually on the gate out front. Visitors ring that and wait for you o respond rather than coming in directly. You get to use the phone to talk to them or invite them in - though it's quite useless when you don't speak Japanese.

The entrance has the lowered area for taking off your shoes and then stepping up to the house itself. Straight ahead is the kitchen/front room. It runs along the right side of the house. The kitchen is in the back of the house and the front room looks out over the yard.

Charles picked us up Tuesday and took us around to some stores for shopping (more about those later) and then up the NIS. I cannot believe this school is going to be ready for us to move into in 20 days! There’s so much left to be done. It is a very ambitious plan and the new renovations and space will allow for more students – though only about 50 at this point. There is a gigantic stack of boxes that are all of the books for the library – it almost fills a classroom. It will be a LOT of work to get them all on the shelves in some semblance of order. It will be interesting. The staff is really nice and they all speak English very well – a big help for us gaijin who can’t say much more than yes, no, excuse me and thank you. We’re looking for a class.

Stay tuned - more to come.