Tokyo adventures

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Thursday, August 26, 2004

A problem with the new apartment

This week was a very busy week for me at work, so on the day that we were supposed to move into our new apartment I had to spend a full day in the office (and a full day in Japan means that you do not get home until 8-10pm), so that R had to deal with the whole moving ordeal by herself (well not entirely by herself of course, the children were there to lend a helping hand). The night before the move had been quite hectic as well, as we had made a slight miscalculation and were under the mistaken impression that we would move on Thursday, and not on Wednesday like everybody else thought (we found out about this when the front desk called and asked what time we were checking out the next day). It was around 10pm when we made our discovery, just before I got home from work and so we spent until 1am packing.

Amazingly the moving day went without too many glitches, Akiko-san our real estate agent came to pick the family up at Oakwood, Naoko-san from FX was picked up on the way, the apartment was inspected and found to be in tiptop condition (complete with the new carpet which we had been allowed to pick), the furniture arrived, most of the bags arrived from Oakwood (though not the ones we had stored in the cellar there) and the children swam in the pool (a major attraction of this apartment) and all was well it seemed.

Or so I was told by my wife when I came home late that night. But then (as was to be expected) Lukas came out of his new bedroom (the girls share) in the night. As I had not yet seen him I tried to talk to him a little bit while I guided him back to his room and futon. I asked him whether he liked the new house, and he said that he liked it fine, but “there is also a problem with this apartment”. I had just showered and dried myself with the 8 inch by 8 inch terricloth rag that served as our communal ‘towel’ it had just been used by Roberta after her bath, so I had an idea. Lukas continued, “It doesn’t have a can opener and Mamma really needs a can opener” then he fell back asleep.

(I later learned that he had been asked to go the neighbor to borrow a can opener earlier that evening. It must have been a bad experience.).

[The day of the move was, again, unbearably hot (it had been slightly, but noticably, cooler for a few days) and I was carrying an unusually heavy backpack as I had been forced to fill it to the brim with electronic equipment because we could not fit everything in the suitcases we had to prepare for the move. Just before I left Roberta handed me a video that we had rented and which needed to be returned. This meant another stop with the metro for me (4 different trains, instead of 3) and a substantial walk up and down the stairs from the street to the platform in Omote Sando station. I got to Shibuya station and got into the Yamanote line (the train that circles the center of Tokyo, which is notoriously crowded) and it was the first time I experienced the stuffing of the train by men with white gloves, who essentially push at the people in the train so that the doors can close. All these factors combined to make me sweat as if I had been doing some kind of strenuous exercise; by the time I arrived at work I could not have been wetter if I had run 5 miles. The difference being that I was now wearing a shirt and tie (although I often take a jacket to work, I never wear it, not a moment; I am putting a stop to this practice). It was a miserable feeling. It took me a good half hour to dry up in the cold conference room.]

The one glitch in the move was that we did not receive all of the bags from Oakwood, because they had forgotten to give the ones we had stored in the cellar to the mover. Also, it turned out that we had ordered too little furniture for the living room, which is very large. So Roberta decided to go back to Jingumae and buy some bean bags in Muji, a store known to be cheap and decent quality. The bean bags are pretty comfortable (especially for children). She also went to buy a few items for the kitchen in the store above the Peacock, the grocery we had frequented almost daily for the last month. There the children were getting impatient with the process. So Roberta gave them some money and told them to get a cold drink downstairs in the peacock—it was yet another blistering day. They went and got some lemon drink which they drank while they walked back with their purchases to Oakwood to drop off the newly purchased goods so they could be shipped to our new place with the bags from the cellar. Just before they get there, Pascale asked Roberta whether she wants to try her drink, saying it tasted kind of funny. (This is no surprise, we have bought many cans from vending machines that looked good from the outside, but turned out to taste quite unusual, like the time when we bought something that we thought would be orange juice, but the content was barely liquid: it came out of the can opening with great difficulty in big slimy chunks it was kind of like you were drinking raw eggs that tasted rather fruity.) So Roberta tried it, and to her surprise the drink tasted much like a gin and tonic. When they got to Oakwood Roberta asked the staff whether the drink contained alcohol she found out that it contained over 6%! Both Saskia and Lukas had by then drunk their entire can. When asked Saskia said that it had tasted funny to her, but as we had paid good money for it, she felt she should not complain and finish it nevertheless. Lukas had liked it fine. Remarkably, they neither felt funny nor did they act strange.

9:02:59 AM

Turtle

At the festival in Azujuban, close to us, where we went Saturday night, Saskia caught a turtle and the poor animal has been miserable here in our apartment in a little dish with some water since; it barely moved and mostly has its four paws and head retracted into its shell. Lukas had been quite jealous of the fact that Saskia had gotten a turtle, in part because he had wanted to catch one himself at a stand at the festival, but he had not been able to do so because they were closing shop.

Yesterday, after school when Roberta came upstairs (the children had gone ahead while she talked with the building manager downstairs) she was informed by the children that the turtle was missing. Lukas was acting strangely, so Roberta asked him if he had taken the turtle. He said that she shouldn’t think that he had flushed the turtle down the toilet. She did not push him any further right then as she wanted to contemplate an appropriate response to what she now was certain to be pet murder. We discussed it when I got home and we decided that she would cancel his playdate with his new Dutch friend planned for today, urge him to tell us the truth and then ask him what he thought would be the best way to compensate for the pain caused to his sister (that pain was not great thankfully, as she had not yet grown that attached to the animal (she is rather frightened of the beast and then the animal barely moves)). However, when she brought up the issue today, he said: “I told you already Mom, I did not do anything with the turtle, I don’t know what happened to it.” And he sounded really convincing that she changed her mind and believed him

That night while taking a little time to myself in the children’s bathroom I look down and see the poor animal next to the toilet. We put it in a pot and gave it food, and it has made a miraculous recovery (we have seen it move!).

9:02:36 AM

Lukas in the Shinkansen

On the way home from Kuruizawa in the Shinkansen, we have reserved seats, but they are not together (this was the busiest weekend of the year). The closest any two seats are to each other is a pair that is across the aisle, so Lukas and I take those, the girls each get to sit next to some friendly Japanese folks. Lukas was rather upset with this arrangement at first, moving his seat back and forth to the chagrin of both the man behind him and me. Then he started looking about the train with a pair of binoculars made from his hands. Soon enough he made eye contact with some young women a few seats in front of us. He started flirting with them looking at them with his big brown eyes and making faces to them to their delight. He asked me for my chewing gum. I had just given him one, and asked him if he needed a paper to spit his gum out in, but he said that he wanted to give some to ‘that girl’. I gave him a look upon which he exclaimed: “Pappa, I just want to be generous.” I gave him the packet of gum, which he took to the young women. He spent the next hour entertaining standing next to them in the aisle. They proved to be an extremely receptive audience to most everything he said or did and practicied their English on him “Where are you from?” “What do you like?” etc. At one point Lukas was explaining Japanese fighting characters he had retrieved from his backpack “Look he’s a bad guy! This one can change and become bigger.” Then one of the woman would translate to the others and they all would respond with great admiration. (Roberta had heard the young women laughing wildly. She thought it was rather inappropriate and surprising, really, given the Japanese concern with proper public behavior. When they got even louder she looked around and was shocked to see her son standing next to them obviously the cause of all the hilarity).

Some of the ways in which he tried to impress his girlfriends were less successful, I thought, such as when he started bouncing a rubberball for them and it promptly disappeared under the seats and he had to crawl on the floor to try and retrieve it, but the Japanese travellers were very tolerant.

Lukas quickly picked up on the fact that his audience was not well-versed in English, so he started to speak louder (unfortunately) and slower and would often repeat phrases; while holding out a plastic ninja fighter he would say “This bad guy, bad guy! This good guy, good guy; he is good!”; the audience: “Aaah! Baduh guy, gooduh guy!”. Sometimes his jokes are too difficult. For example, when he explained about a vegetales character: “This is a cucumber, but everybody calls him pickle” he is the only one that laughs.

9:01:59 AM