Settling In

Well, I have been in Beppu for almost three weeks now. My apartment is slowly but surely acquiring furnishings. Eric arrived a week ago--his plane landed in Tokyo the same day as a big earthquake! Fortunately the trains got up and running again quickly and he was able to hop on the Shinkansen (bullet train) to get down here. He arrived in Beppu around 1:30am but I took the next day off of work so I could stay up and meet him at the station. It has been really exciting having someone to pal around with. We don't have a car or bicycles yet so we've been doing a ton of walking. I even lost a little weight! It has been hard getting used to the grocery stores though. We can't read the ingredients on any of the packages yet so we are having to buy things that give cooking instructions in pictures. lol Cooking is turning into quite an adventure. Fortunately there are quite a few good restaurants nearby that are inexpensive. Their menus also include full color pictures which help a lot when we are deciding what to eat! We go out quite a bit, but it's cool because there are no tips here (waiters make an hourly wage) so going out is really reasonable. The convenience stores ("conbini" in Japanese) also carry a really good selection of sandwiches, onigiri (rice balls), and snack foods for when we are feeling really lazy. Probably the biggest things I miss right now are pizza and breakfast cereal. The only breakfasts cereals over here are cornflakes, so it's pretty much just plain cornflakes, frosted flakes, or chocolate corn flakes. The chocolate ones at least are really good because they are chocolate-y without being overly sweet. yum!