Aliens

It's official - Roo, Chrys and I are aliens. (Owl has to wait until we get his visa approved...hopefully after Christmas.) We managed to find the town hall today. Chrys got directions, but I even managed to find it on the map of Isahaya City (諫早市) we borrowed from a friend. (Which entailed learning how to use a map and realizing that the address for the town center, 東小路町7-1 or East Path Town 7-1, wasn't a street, but more like coordinates in a quadrant labelled 東小路町. With that, I'm starting to understand Japanese addressing and realizing that our address, Kuremo 308-1, tells people almost nothing about where we actually live. Additionally, I need to learn how to write that in Japanese so we can stop confusing the poor people who want our address.) Even better, we found a place to take more passport photos that was just down the street from the town hall. Since alien registration wasn't on our list of "thing you would need a picture for" we had run out after getting our visas. We got a few more and went in. We should be able to pick up the cards sometime in November. For now, we have a sheet of paper declaring that we're in process that should let us get our cell phones. Lots of hoops to jump through.

The neat thing is that the town center was about two blocks from the open air market where I had ordered my mitome inkan so we got to go pick that up. Unfortunately, the bank was closed so we weren't able to use it today. (In googling for a picture of one, I realize that we may have to register it to be able to use it at the bank...plus, there were no good pictures - a very depressing Google.) Chrys told me yesterday that the Tokyo company guys had suggested he use ゴードン (GōDoN) for his business cards so maybe I'll get another inkan made someday. It was simple enough. Plus, the lady recognized me as soon as I walk in the door. I figure she doesn't get many foreigners in her little shop.

Oh...and today's word of the day is pickled plum (umeboshi). That's what Owl and I had for dinner, with a bowl of noodles and soup, at the noodle shop in the park across the street. I liked it, though it was very salty/sour. Owl wouldn't eat his. Chrys had a beef, onion and (what tasted like) Worchestershire sauce omelette on rice. After we ordered, the proprietor of the shop carried one of the plums out to show me and make sure that's what I had ordered. Not having any idea what it was, but feeling adventurous, I told him "hai" and away we went. Only later did I manage to find the symbol in my book and realize that it didn't look at all like the symbol for pork as I had thought - oops!