Signed, Sealed, Delivered

Chad has been trying for awhile now, via mail, to complete all the necessary paperwork to be able to transfer money between our US bank account and the one we have here.  It hasn't been easy because they keep sending it back with a note that the says the "signature doesn't match".  When you sign an important document here they will scrutinize your signature and make sure it matches all your other signatures.  If you're like Chad, and myself, it doesn't always look exactly the same every time you sign something.  Plus sometimes I use my initials, sometimes I include my middle initial, and don't even get me started on that dang apostrophe.

Anyway, we went to Citibank on Saturday to try to take care of it in person.  While there, they showed Chad the signature they were trying to match to (his alien registration card, I think?) and had him try no less than three times before they got one they would accept.  They were hung up on how the "M" that is his middle initial looked.  Geez.

He offered to use his hanko [hane-ko] to do it but they wanted to keep going with the signature.  A hanko is a stamp that Japanese people can use in place of their signature.  I suppose they do it to get around the trouble we went through.  Chad got one when we first got here---he had to go have it registered (at city hall, I think) and he has to carry the registration papers with it.

the hanko (it just says "D'ESPOSITO")

Success at Last!

I finally found my first geocache in Japan!  For those of you who have no idea what a geocache is, it's a container hidden by someone with a GPS for other people to then locate with their GPS.  There are geocaches and people finding them all over the world, for lists of them and more information on what on earth I'm talking about, go here.

Chad introduced me to geocaching years ago, but he doesn't like to do it much anymore so these days I usually hunt them by myself.  He did get me a really nice GPS a year or two ago but unfortunately it didn't come with maps of Japan (I think there are some you can buy now but they can get pretty pricey).  No matter though, because now there is an iPhone app (made by the official site) that works really well.

This was not the first time I had looked for a cache here in Japan, I nearly got irretrievably lost in Ginza looking for one and risked a divorce trying to find one in Odaiba with Chad.  I prefer the method of geocaching whereby you look for them during the normal course of your day if you have some time to kill (the iPhone app makes this super easy).  This is also called "caching-for-numbers" because you can find a lot this way (i.e. run up your "found" number) but the downside is you can see some pretty boring caches in annoyingly crowded places.  Some people only cache when they can make an event of it and concentrate on the more interesting/isolated caches---this is more what we did when we first started geocaching.

At any rate, after our Krispy Kreme breakfast Sunday morning, Chad headed off to Akihabara and I fired up the app.  There are about a million geocaches in Tokyo and more throughout the rest of the country.  I can tell by the descriptions and logs (on the website) that Japanese people geocache too, but fortunately most of them are are written in English.

It took me about three minutes thanks to a good hint and a low difficulty level.

the cache

contents (I didn't take anything to move,
who knows when I'll find my next one)

signing the logbook...I realized while looking at this photo
that I dated it in August rather than October...I don't know
what I was thinking.  I noted it on the weblog later.

standing next to where I found it

Stop in Shinjuku

This past weekend we spent Saturday night in the Shinjuku area of Tokyo.  Unfortunately we got a late start and didn't have quite as big an adventure as I had hoped.  First we had to go to Citibank to take care of some banking matters that had become rather complicated.... but more on that in a later post.  We had been invited to dinner on Saturday night with some fellow American expats that live near Shinjuku---we had a good time hanging out with them and comparing city life to country life.  And it's always nice to be able to speak American English at full speed!

that night we enjoyed the panoramic views from our room

Shinjuku is known as where Tokyoites go to party....it's a very lively area and has almost become the center of the city in recent years.  There is a lot of nightlife, including a red-light district and areas for those who lead, um...alternative lifestyles.  Right now the city still isn't very lit up at night....Chad remembers Shinjuku in 2005 as being a lot brighter.  You can go here and get a good idea (these photos are way better than mine) of what it can look like.  There are also some good photos of Shinjuku station which is famous being the busiest train station in the world.  Over two million people go through it in a day and I think I bounced off about half of them over the weekend.  There is no way I can stop and take decent photos in there without losing Chad, or my camera, or one of my feet.

There are also lots of street performers around Shinjuku....we saw all manner of instruments being played and some truly, truly terrible street karaoke.

I think this was some kind of lute

you also see random puzzle buildings....

and monsters....

and endless little pedestrian streets
full of tiny shops

One of the big selling points of our hotel was that it has a Krispy Kreme right next to it.  That's right, Krispy Kreme is in Japan.  This isn't the first one I've found, there is one at the Kita-Senju train station which is where we always stop on our way in and out of the city.  The donut selection is pretty much the same as in the US, maybe a little less variety.  Most importantly, it tastes right. ;)

Skin's can't be far behind, right?  right?

There also just happened to be a Mexican restaurant on the ground floor of our hotel which was a pleasant surprise (and a good lunch).  As you all know that's almost like wandering across a yeti.  I'll be posting a little more about our trip later in the week... meanwhile there are a few more photos on Shutterfly.

century southern tower hotel....yum!