Garbage and Recycling

It might sound bizarre to make a post about this, but IT'S.A.THING. There are many rules and collection happens all week. 

There are four types of garbage. Red is the easiest. It's burnable. This includes kitchen scraps, dirty plastics (like when buying food and eating on the go) and anything else that doesn't fit in the other categories. The hazardous category is collected in a separate bag on the same day. This garbage is collected twice a week (so nice)!

Green is nonburnable trash. It's things that can't be recycled, or are big. Things likes batteries, old small appliances, broken dishes, or in our case, my garment bag that was dragged along behind Papa P's truck. It's only collected once a month. We just missed putting out for the moth by a week. 

The most complicated category is recycling. It's divided five subcategories: glass, plastic bottles, other plastics (including film plastic that is commonly used to wrap new items in the store which I couldn't recycle in the US), metal cans (soda and canned goods), and paper. 

Me, trying to figure out today's recycling (Monday), which covers four types of recycling. 

I went to take the first bag of plastic bottles and realized it was more than just that today. I hadn't looked super closely at the paper--today is also paper and cans (we don't have any glass bottles). I cheated by looking at how others had sorted it.

I went to the store to buy smaller bags. Our relocation contact had me buy 45 liter bags for recycling and burnable garbage, but they are way too big for our trash sorting cabinet and our amount of plastic bottles and cans. 

Bags for trash MUST be bought within the city you are using them in. The cost of the bags pays for the collection. 

The Nagoya bags have their owl mascot on them. 

This recycling day is done at the park. Other plastics such as wrappers are left in front of the house, once a week, on Wednesdays. For today's recycling,  there are signs thar have writing and pictures on them telling you where to sort each kind. I ran into one of my older neighbors here for yhe first time. I spoke with her in my broken, particle-less Japanese abd told her we lived over there, came from America, and that my husband works for Toyota. I am sure I sounded worse than a three year old. I probably sounded like a cave woman, but I tried. She seemed pleased to meet me. 

There is one more way to recycle that I forgot! Paper milk cartons and styrofoam meat and food trays are recycled at the grocery store! Milk comes in liter cartons and you rinse and cut open the carton. 

Last week when I went on a walk it was burnable garbage day. I took a few pictures because I thought it was interesting. I saw the garbage truck and several guys jumping out to collect the garbage from several houses at a time. I think this was an apartment building or business. They have the cages to keep the birds from getting in the garbage. Not sure why there were blue bags on the right. 

Residents in houses or apartments sometimes had nets, also to keep the birds out. Apparently a lot are yellow (but not all) because supposedly the birds can't see them. Our contact called them crows, but the ones I saw were so huge, I think they were ravens. Ravens are smart!

I think I have a basic understanding of the garbage sorting here, although, I think there is always more to learn!

Festival at Nagoya Castle

We took the train to Nagoya Castle, it was the first time the boys have ever taken the train here and the first time in a sixteen years that I have taken them.  We had to change trains to get there, so I was grateful Papa P was the navigator. 

I'm a big sucker for sky pictures.

Here we all are together. It was hot and humid...excuse my hair. Haha.

The very green area on the right is part of the castle's moat. The tents on the left were for the festival.

Beautiful sky and lots of people. The ones up closer to the drummers (where the red and white lamps are) were dancing. 

The dancing came closer to us. 

C and Papa P. 

There was food and shaved ice for sale. Not pictured was the games. There was target shooting, ring toss, and fishing games. 

We stood in line for shaved ice. 

They used big ice blocks in their machine. You can see one behind the spray bottle. 

This one is strawberry. 

This one is peach. G wouldn't let me take another picture, so this is what I have. He's not always thrilled to have me take pictures.

This is one of my favorite photos of the night. 

I noticed this tree on the way out. Anyone know what kind it is?

On the way out we were going to take turns being in the picture with the kids, but a nice lady offered to take our picture for us. 

A map in the subway of what it used to look like.

Cool mural on the stairs. 

I saw this on the way home. It's a terrible picture, but I thought the cats fighting was funny. The subject matter of the poster was not. 

I found a better poster in the train station. Papa P said the poster said something like, "Even if you are a cat, don't use violence."

I played pokémon go earlier in the day-it was a community day where more of a certain pokémon show up and there is a good chance you'll get shiny (different colored than normal). With the walking from that (I caught just more than 100 as I explorer my neighborhood) and going to the castle, I got more than 13,000 steps, which is more than I have been getting with all the moving craziness. I was very tired! 

Getting Japanese Cell Phone Service

Trying to get sim cards for our phones was very long and arduous process. Papa P went into our cell phone provider in the US and wanting to pay off our phones. They didn't let him and told him to port our numbers (we saved them to Google Voice so we can still have them when we return to the US) and then they'd bill for the rest. 

Well, it wasn't so simple. He couldn't get into his account to pay off the remaining balance because he ported the numbers. Also, apparently there is a two week waiting period with any of the phones that weren't paid off, and they couldn't tell him what the bill would be, even though when he paid the bill each month, it told him the remaining balance on our phones. So my phone and the two boys are all locked. Papa P bought his phone entirely separate from our service provider, so fortunately can use his new sim card in his phone. 

In order to get approved for a sim card, they enter your information into the system and you have to have a credit card. Then it will come back approved or denied. If denied, there are no explanations. 

Papa P came back approved, then G, but C was denied. Then I was approved (using my own credit card), then they tried to get C approved using me as the adult and he was denied again. Then Papa P, for whatever reason, was denied. So G and I were the only ones approved out of four people! So... Papa P signed something to change G's sim card to his name. 

We thought it was over, but it wasn't. Then Papa P put his new sim card in his existing phone and it didn't work. He turned his phone off and on and tried it again. He turned his language on the phone to Japanese and let the clerk try to figure it out. Papa P Googled what might be the problem. We finally gave up and asked if we could cancel. The answer was yes, AFTER ONE MONTH! 

We took the sim card and my new phone and left. We got into the car to leave and suddenly, HE HAD SERVICE!  Oh what a pain, but at least the two adults have working phones! 

I thought the little stuffed mascots were cute...

I thought this kid's carry case was fun. 

On the bright side, I got a fun iredescent phone out of it! After we get my phone from the states taken care of, I'll switch the sim card to that one and keep this one for a backup. 

When all was said and done we were there three hours. We lost the opportunity to go shopping in a car with our contact from the relocation company because it took so long... we wanted to go to IKEA and get a few things, or check out the futon store, as we plan to buy futons to sleep on. It'll have to wait for another day. 

A Little House Tour

We got into our house this week! This is all of our luggage; it was so cumbersome!

G has to duck a little to walk in our toilet rooms and duck even more to go into our tatami rooms. 

The toilet room. That is a sink spigot in the middle. It runs automatically when you flush. We also have bidets on both toilets. 

Our bath is completely separate from the toilets. In a traditional Japanese bath you sit on a stool and wash yourself first, rinse, then soak in the tub. Everyone shares the same bath water, as you are clean when you use it, so the thing standing up in the tub is the bath cover. The rod we are hanging our towels on can also be used for clothes. There is a control outside the bath that can be used to dry clothes! 

The panel in the wall on the right turns the hot water on and off. There is also one in the kitchen. 

This is our dishwasher. It holds four of everything, but only two of the mugs when everything is in it, but that's OK because it fits all of our glasses. We have to wash dishes after every meal since we only have one of everything for each person! It's not enough dishes to fill the washer, though, so we have been doing it by hand. 

Our washing machine is also a dryer. The wash cycle takes less than an hour, but, the dry cycle takes about THREE HOURS! Lots of Japanese people hang dry their clothes. I tried it with one of our loads of laundry, but it rained, so some of it was really wet!

This is one of our traditional tatami rooms. Tatami refers to the flooring. It is straw weaved together to make mats. Tatami are a standard size and they rooms can even be measured by the number of mats!

Thus is our tiny backyard. 

This is our clothes line. I'll be using it to dry clothes often. 

The best part about our backyard is this traditional broom! How cool is that?! 

We still have many orgazational things to get and we are going to buy futons to sleep on. I'll update as we settle in more.