Sayonara, Hiroshima

This week a major change took place in my life. I bid goodbye to the city of Hiroshima, a city I was proud to call home for close to two years.

This summer I will be in Santa Cruz, California.

In August, or thereabouts, I'll be moving to Chicago to begin a new chapter of adventures.

Stay tuned.

Time to take out the trash

Some stuff in Japan is really easy. A lot simpler than back home. Like paying your bills, for example. You can walk into any 7-11, hand them your gas bill and pay for it along with your fried octopus and limited edition Snoopy mug. But some stuff feels unnecessarily complicated.

For example, the garbage here is categorized into eight different categories (terrible, terrible English). Each kind of garbage gets put into a different kind of bag (color-coded according to the colored circles on the left) and then set out on a different day. It is highly unlikely that I would be able to grasp a system like this one back home; add in the fact that the instructions are entirely in Japanese and it's a near impossibility.

The end result is that there are mounds of garbage tucked away in every corner of my apartment: behind the sink, wrapped in bags in the coat closet, stuffed into socks and hung over the railing on my veranda.

So with all this excess waste laying around, I've decided to become a manure farmer. And build children's toys out of used cardboard boxes.