Happy Halloween!

I had assumed that Halloween wasn't really celebrated in Japan, so imagine my surprise when pumpkin paraphernalia started showing up in stores about six weeks ago.  I first noticed it in the imported foods store, then the florist and gift shops, and by now pretty much every store everywhere, including restaurants, have pumpkins and ghosts and orange all over the place. (The spiderweb donuts at Krispy Kreme are really good, btw.)

I immediately quizzed our Japanese teacher about what we should expect in terms of trick-or-treating.  She had no idea what I was talking about.  She said, "So children come to your house and you have to give them candy to get them to go away?".  I told her that pretty much summed it up and she said that it didn't happen here.  She also said you couldn't get real pumpkins of carving size, only the tiny ones sometimes.  I haven't really seen any decorated houses either.

Oddly enough I have seen a couple of tiny displays of costumes, mostly Disney stuff.  Disney is popular here because there is a Disneyland smack in the middle of Tokyo.  Mickey and Minnie do a good job of ingratiating themselves into the more international holidays.  I think the costume display I saw was optimistic on the part of the store....after all, Japanese people do love to dress up in costumes.

While on the subject of holidays, I am sad to report that Japanese stores jump the gun just as bad as American stores do---in other words, Christmas has arrived!  But I refuse to say more than that until it is at least Thanksgiving. ;)

Disney costumage

cactus pumpkins in Cainz

shelves and shelves of cheap junk

Kaldi, the imported foods store (six weeks ago)

spooky pumpkin at the florist

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