Initial Feelings

Japan is a really interesting place to live. Everything is so convenient as on the walk home there are two grocery stores, a bunch of restuarants, 2 bakeries, a drug store, a convenience store and alot of other random stuff....and its only a 10 minute walk home. This is really awesome, but bad for my wallet as I can just randomly buy food and such all the time. So far, I really love it here, but damn... all the walking! There's so much walking, I don't know how people can stand it, and I'm wearing sneakers all the time but I always see ladies wearing high heels... Seriously... they have to WALK in that ALL THE TIME?!!? That's just painful. Walking in the heat is the worst thing ever here. I've never felt so HOT in my life. Its BLOODY hot.. You know that episode of Friends where Ross is wearing leather pants and he has to use the washroom? He takes his pants off and struggles to put them back on cause they are literally stuck to his body. My jeans aren't as tight as leather pants but I've definitely had that ROSS PANTS feeling several times. When I told Roberta, she just kinda gave me a really weird look cause my pants are usually more form fitting but she did agree w/ me after it happened to her ;) The weather is cooling down now, so its not as bad. The annoying thing is most of the company's branches are near train stations. So the minute you get off the train, basically you see the location. Not my branch, there's a good 15 minute walk to where my location is... in long sleeve business wear under the hot bright sun. The weird thing is... It seems as if I'm the only one sweating buckets, all the Japanese people seem unphased by the heat, but you'd thing that they probably be wearing short sleeves.. but NO!!! They are wearing more clothes than I am.. sweaters and the like in boiling weather and don't look bothered by the heat at all. How is this possible?? There's always a humid type of sticky weather going on.

I've also come to experience that flash rain happens in Japan. It rains all the time but one minute it can be perfectly sunny and the next minute, the rain is just pouring down on you like there's no tomorrow. I always laughed when watching Japanese drama since it would suddenly rain at a dramatic moment when the sky was perfectly beautiful the previous scene and it also always seemed like the characters could get umbrellas out of nowhere all of a sudden to shield the female heroin from the rain. THIS IS SO TRUE. It rains for no reason at all, it will be perfectly nice outside and it will just start raining. Umbrellas can be purchased EVERYWHERE... convenience stores, grocery stores, any store on the street basically and they are SO CHEAP. You can get good umbrealls for 100 Yen ($1) and the ones that cost $20 in Toronto at the ONE in pacific mall... $5 here. Its no wonder, it rains so much... for a while, I couldn't even see people having portable umbrellas cause apparently they wouldn't work very well in this type of rain. I've also heard that typhoon season is upon us, and that no methods of water proofing oneself will work against that type of rain. We'll see tho.... Even at our house, we have a whole bucket full of umbrellas, there's so many! I guess people just buy umbrellas on the street when it rains since they have to walk everywhere otherwise they would get soaked. I know I've had to do that on two occasions :S