So sometimes, with the plethora of things that happen to me in my everyday life, I forget the fact that I am living in one of the most messed up countries in the world. No wait, scratch that. I always remember that, but I do often forget to look around at the good things Japan has to offer. So First I will tell you a story about Japan being the most inefficient country in the world. Then I will show you some pictures of beautiful Japan, then I will tell you another story about how inefficient Japan can be.

So me and Michel are moving to another prefecture. We dont own a whole lot of stuff between us, some shelves, a couple futons, books and our clothing. But we do have a fairly large bed which we can’t put in a car so we decided to hire movers because we had been told that they are pretty reasonable here. We set up appointments for two companies to come to Michel’s apartment and give us an estimate of how much it would cost us to move our crap. Now picture this, we have one large bed and then some small odds and ends. All in all it amounts to a small truck load, think the smallest U-Haul you can get.

First company comes at 9:30 on a Sunday morning, that was tough after drinking the night before. But we did a quick clean up, showed the dude around, then waited for him to calculate. He showed me the paper and I nearly choked on my coffee… 900 dollars. Me and Michel were like “hahaha yeah, we’ll call you.” After that we thought the second company couldn’t possibly cost more. Ohhh Japan, how you love to surprise me. Second dude shoves a paper at us that read 100,000 yen. That is about 1000 dollars. ONE THOUSAND DOLLARS to move one load of stuff 2 hours away. I can not even imagine how much it would cost if we actually had to move stuff, like a fridge and washing machine and furniture!!! I mean, come on! I could fly to America and back for that much money. I N S A N E

Ok now a semi-nice story, of which I have posted pictures at the bottom. Megan, a friend who lives close to Michel, offered to drive us to Mt Fuji before we move away, which was ever so nice of her because Michel hasn’t been before. So we went this past Sunday. Unfortunately it was really cloudy (yet sunny… weird) and we couldn’t see Fuji, but we did go sight seeing around the lakes that lie at its base in our prefecture. It was a pretty active trip, we walked around Kawaguchiko, ate in a cute Italian restaurant, then went to visit a shrine in Fujiyoshida. The shrine is the main entrance to hike up Mt Fuji from the north side. It was a pretty big grounds and the building there is about 350 years old. The inner shrine has been around in some form for about 1200 years!

So after visiting the shrine we decided to head back because I had a bus to catch at 5:15. We got into Megan’s car and she promptly drove into a pole.

…

Yes, a big yellow pole, and none of us saw it. I swear, even after we hit the damn thing I couldn’t see it. It was really weird. So that caused all kinds of problems because Japan loves to be problematic!! We had to call this guy Megan knew in the area and he drove with us back to his place, because his father in law is a mechanic. He and his wife put plastic on the back windshield, which had shattered, then we had to go meet the police at the scene of the pole smashing. Hahahaha… ok I am alright. The police spent about an hour interogating Megan about the horrific crash (please, feel my sarcasm). One really funny part was the fact that they were really hung up on whether she had damaged the pole. The big, yellow, metal pole. They did some paperwork, then examined the pole, then did some more paperwork, then interogated Megan some more, then examined the pole again, then did more paperwork, then… well you get the point. Needless to say, I missed my bus. Not too big a deal, I just had to get up an hour early in the morning to catch a bus back to mine for school.

Ok thats enough yammering, look at me pictures XD