Neighborhood

I live in a very interesting neighborhood. I'm living in an apartment that has houses all around the back and part of one side but it is also close to a main street so there are also several restaurants, a supermarket, and little shops nearby so it's a nice mixture of all kinds of things. One of the nearby shops also has several plots of plants and vegetables planted next to my apartment building so the contrast between plantings and the bike parking lot or the back lot of the supermarket is interesting. And the supermarket is open 24 hours so there are always people. There's a preschool and a park within a 3 minute walk and a lot of families live around me so there are always kids around. And I live 5 minutes away from the local university so I also see a lot of the students on their way to classes or on their way home. The roads around me definitely do not follow a grid pattern so I get lost a lot but everyone in the neighborhood that I've talked to is really sweet and helpful and I've always been able to find my way back. I've had lots of great conversations with mothers from the preschool too! My host sister often wants me to take her to school when I have a morning free or come pick her up when I get home early. One thing that I'm kind of interested in exploring is the relationships between all the families that live in my apartment building. So far I haven't met a single person, aside from my host family, that lives in my apartment building which is different from my experiences in apartment buildings in the US so I'm interested in how the residents all relate to each other.

I still need to take pictures to add to this but there are my comments so far. I'm having trouble getting my computer to read my SD card so I think I need to find an external SD reader to get my pictures out of the camera which is frustrating.

Initial Impressions

Ok, so initial impressions of Japan now that I've been here long enough to adjust a little. My very first impression was HOT! just as I was getting off the plane. The airport was surprisingly well organized and I got through it all pretty quickly so I must have gotten in at the perfect time. Other than that the main first glimpses I got of Japan were from the windows of the shinkansen on the way to Morioka. The main impression that I got it that while the scenery I was looking at was different from what I would have seen from a train window in the US it all felt the same to me. The first few days that I was here were full of confusion and I just sort of blindly followed whoever I was supposed to and followed the plan. Other impressions I remember from the first few days: the cars are cute, the barriers for construction areas are cute, why don't we have those, and there are a lot more bugs that I'm used to. Considering that I'm from an affluent suburb where people like to use lots of chemicals to keep their lawns looking green and fake, that's not surprising. Newer impressions are the ease with which my host family switches between scolding the children and playing together and how interesting peoples reactions are to things I say. "We don't have consomme flavored potato chips in America" or "It took me half an hour to drive to my middle school" are followed by extreme surprise and I enjoy sort of comparing everyone's surprises.

Also, I highly approve of the amount of grapefruit flavored stuff there is here. Grapefruit is one of my staple foods and I always miss it in the summer in the US because it's out of season but it's everywhere here and this makes me happy. This is where my title came from because I'm eating grapefruit as I work on this.