I'm baaaack

Rumours of my demise have been greatly exaggerated, to quote some famous person. My roommate finally got off his butt and bought a laptop. He's leaching wireless internet off of our neighbours and I'm leaching the computer off of him. Doesn't the world work perfectly when we're all using each other? Anyways the long and short of it is that I now have regular access to the internet again, at least for a while.

My apartment hunt continues but I'm thinking of giving up and just staying put. I've found out that the hard truth is that it's expensive to live by yourself in Tokyo. If I was living with 2 other people then it would be super cheap but when you're by yourself there are just too many expenses that eat away at the bottom line. My roommate might want to move sometime in August so maybe I'll try again then. Going to agents usually leaves me in a bad mood and frustrated with the general Japanese populace.

There are so many ridiculous things you have to deal with when getting an apartment here. First off is "key money" which I like to call ransom money. Basically you pay the landlord a gift for him giving you the apartment. It's usually about 1-2 months rent. I'm sorry but if I'm going to be handing out gobs of money every month for an empty room then I am the one who expects a gift! Oh well, doesn't work that way here.

Another irksome payment is the money to get the appartment cleaned before you move in. It's usually about 1/2 to 1 months rent. This is the most ridiculous thing of all. No way should it take $600 to clean a room, I'm sorry. I feel like saying, let me go buy a bottle of Mr. Clean and a mop and I'll clean the apartment myself for 10 bucks. But that isn't the way it works here. I've seen it happen in my apartment. When my roommate moved out a team of 4 cleaners came in and spent about an hour and a half doing who knows what. When they left the room basically looked the exact same as before only there was no longer any more dust on the lights.

The reason why this bothers me so much is because I have to pay $600 just so that the Japanese can go on creating absolutely useless jobs for people. It seems to be everywhere in their society. When they close a road to do construction they put up a big sign blocking the road and pointing out the direction of the new route for the cars to take. But then standing in front of the sign is a guy with a baton pointing cars in exact same direction!!! Can someone please explain to me the sense of employing somebody to do a job that an inanimate object is already doing perfectly well?? Same goes for the uniformed traffic guy who walks around the grocery store parking lot with a baton in his hand and pumps up peoples bike tires. I'm sure people can turn into the parking lot perfectly well without a crossing guard thank you and if they had a flat bike tire then they probably would not have ridden their bike to the grocery store! It's because of this kind of backwards thinking that I'm expected to pay a months rent for 4 guys to dust my room!

I picked up a new phone yesterday. It was free but it's a pretty darned good phone. I can listen to the radio on it and i can upload and download files to/from the laptop by way of infrared. I got tired of the crappy reception of Vodafone and the fact that only us gajins seem to use Vodafone. I got a japanese phone this time so that I can be like my brethern. Not to mention it has awesome reception! :)

Anyways hopefully I can make some more posts and upload some more pics soon!