Home Sweet Home...

This is the front of our building

Our home office

Our dinning room

Kitchen

Garbage sorting and pick up list! (you can click on the picture to make it bigger)

Living Room

Home Sweet Home... Part 2

This is the front half of our house...  Sorry its not all in the same post because there were too many pictures!

Our two twin beds held together by a bungee strap...  Audrey wasn't mad at me last night so we got to keep them strapped together:)

The booty comfort 2000.... equipped with seat warmer, bidet (booty washer, girls only button and water pressure adjuster) massage function, dryer, and automatic deodorizer!!! Can you ask for more from a toilet?

Front red button stops the bidet, green button is for the rear, pink button is for girls, the knob is for water pressure and gold button is the dryer!!!

Our front bathroom has a sink and our washing machine in it.   There is a dryer for your bottom but not for your clothes... go figure!

Here is our shower room... yes that is  a full sized mirror right under the shower head... YIKES!!!!

A day of School, The Mukidori and Octopus Balls!!

Thursday was an exciting day of new adventures.  We got up bright and early and got ready for our school orientation.  Some teachers from the local schools picked us up and took us to a meeting hall where we were introduced to a bunch of teachers from all over Himeji.  We had to do our own introduction, part of which had to be in Japanese, which was a breeze for my beautiful multi-lingual wife but not quite as easy for me.  She said "Hajimemashite watashiwa Henderson Audrey des.  Yoroshiku onegaishimasu" which means Hello, I have never met you... I am called Audrey Henderson... Im pleased to meet you.  After our introductions we were able to meet with the head English teacher from our schools.  My teacher is a very jovial older Japanese man who loves to talk and speaks English very well.  He was very friendly and full of "genki"(energy).  I look forward to the classes that I will be teaching with him and growing our relationship.  After talking a little bit at the meeting hall he drove me to Himeji High school and showed me to the giant teachers office.  In Japan teachers dont have their own rooms, instead the students stay in a home room and the teachers rotate to the students.  I was not able to see the classrooms though because they were under construction (this should make my mom happy because they were reinforcing the walls and window openings to better handle earthquakes).  After visiting the school he then took me to lunch at a Chinese restaurant.  He ordered for me and I ended up with a bowl of ramen with some fish and beef in it.  I love the Japanese culture because everyone slurps their noodles without biting them off.  I have definitely enjoyed this aspect of the culture but Im glad my mom is not here to see it because that was not allowed in our house:)  After a delicious lunch and great conversation he brought me home.  Unfortunately, Audrey was no where to be found because she had gone to lunch with her teacher as well... so I waited and waited and waited and two hours later she comes bouncing in the door with a huge kool-aid smile on her face saying "I had so much fun."  The English teacher at her school took her to his house where he fed her little ham and egg sandwich a cucumber and mayonnaise sandwich and a breaded shrimp sandwich that she really enjoyed.  After lunch he took her to her school where he introduced her to other english teachers.  They introduced her to other teachers and the principal and gave her a tour of the school.  Then three of the english teachers took her to lunch at a cafe' where she ordered a salad because she was still full from her first lunch.  She really enjoyed getting to know them.  During lunch they gave her a japanese lesson and they chatted about the japanese culture.  After all of this she returned home, changed her clothes and we headed out for a bike ride with Andre, Emily and Sianna.  Our destination was the mukidori which is a HUGE shopping center with multi-storied 100 yen stores and tons of clothing/shoe stores.  The ride took about 20 minutes and about 3 minutes into it the rain started coming down pretty steadily.  Needless to say we were pretty wet by time we arrived... but we loved every minute of it!  We went into a few of the shops and found that size 12 in mens shoes just dont exist in the Japanese market... nor do size 9 in womens.  I kind of felt like freak show walking through the market... Im not sure that these people see a large sweaty white man lumbering through the mukidori everyday.  People were pointing and staring and I swear I heard someone yell GODZILLA!  Okay maybe not the godzilla part but the pointing and staring part really happened.  On our way out we saw a stand that was selling these round dough balls.  I asked Andre what they were and he said they were Octopus balls.  After I heard that the first thing that popped into my head was "when in Japan..." so I went over and ordered a box of 8 for dinner(see picture below).  Then I made another cultural mistake... I opened the box, took my chop sticks and started walking and just as I was about to put one in my mouth Andre stopped me and reminded me that its very rude to walk and eat in Japan.  So we decided we would eat them at home.  By this time the rain had cleared but Andre had a flat tire.  He was able to ride it a little ways but then it looked like we were going to have to walk it back which was at least another 2 miles.  Luckily we found a gas station that aired it up for him and we were cruising again.  We made it home safely and we didn't get lost which was a huge victory in itself.  Audrey and I sat down and ate our Octopus balls which were actually really tasty.  They were covered in mayonnaise and green onions and the batter around them was similar to bisquick.  After dinner we decided that since it was still light outside we would go on an adventure of our own.  So we rode to my school and then we went to a park and practiced our Japanese flash cards.  A couple of our words of the day were watashi (wah-tah-shee), watashitachi (wah-tah-shee-tah-chee), Ikura desu ka, (ee-koo-rah  dess   kah), sayonara (say-yoh-nah-rah), Ogenki desu ka (oh-gen-kee  dess  kah).  When it got dark we headed home, showered, watched a couple episodes of the Office Season 2 and then fell asleep around 9 p.m. only to wake up this morning between 4 and 5 a.m.  You may be wondering what our Japanese words mean but the teachers in us want you to figure it out for yourself and then post a comment on our blog with the word and what it means in English.   So we are going to make this an interactive blog but don't be "that guy" who translates and posts all of the words and ruins it for everyone else... one word per person please!!!  We hope you are enjoying our blog and practice up on your Japanese so you will be fluent when you come out and visit us;)  We are ready to start booking reservations for our spare bedroom/living room!!

Audrey and her new friends

A little slice of heaven in the Mukidori

Two words... Octopus Balls!!!!

Audrey's first bite of an octopus ball... YUMMY!!!

This is what it looks like on the inside... the little purple piece in the middle was a tentacle and you could actually see the little "suckers" on it.

Day 2...

Another exciting day come and gone.  We met Honda-san yesterday morning and he took us to City Hall where we got started on some paper work to get our foreign registration cards.  It was quite the process as we had no idea what we were doing, but Honda-san was very helpful.  After filling out the first round of forms we went and sat in the waiting area and much to my excitement the Red Sox/Yankees game was playing on a huge LCD TV.  JACKPOT!!!  The announcers were speaking Japanese but it made no difference to me... it was baseball!  After finishing our registration forms we went to the bank, which was in the same building, to set up our accounts and then we went to lunch down stairs in the basement.  We were a little hesitant because we were about to eat foreign food... from a cafeteria... in a basement!  From all the knowledge we had to draw from this seemed like a bad idea.... but as Audrey and I have been saying since we landed "when in Japan do as the Japanese do."  We literally had no idea what we were grabbing aside from the tofu Audrey picked as one of her side dishes and some rice. Thankfully my mystery meal ended up being sweet and sour chicken, potato poppers, rice and miso soup while Audrey had beef stir fry, tofu, rice and miso soup.  By the end of the nine of us Americans were all saying that we would eat at this cafeteria daily if possible because it was so "oishii"(delicious).  Once we finished lunch we explored the area around the city hall building for about an hour and then headed to the port to get our re-entry visas.  After we finished filling out those forms we headed back to our apartment around 4 p.m.  After hanging out for a few minutes we took a long walk to the max value.... a three story Japanese shopping extravaganza.  The top floor was a 100 yen store (like a $1 store) where we got a bunch of "stuff" for our apartment.  Then we headed down to the grocery store which was extremely overwhelming... but so much fun!  We will take pictures next time... this time we were on a mission to find meals for the next couple of days.  We ended up with a cart full of groceries... most of which are still a mystery to us... but the pictures looked good:)  Last night we had some dumplings for dinner and they were fantastic!  We still are not sure what was in them, but that is probably a good thing.  We even cut out the label from the package it came in so we can get it again sometime.  After dinner we showered and crashed at around 9:30.  We have been so blessed not to have experienced much jet lag at all.  We hope all is well in your neck of the woods and look forward to hearing from you soon.

Josh wearing the loaner glasses for people who need a little help with the small writing on the forms at the port... He looks a little bit like Mr. Potato head:)

Lunch!?!?

Ohayo gozaimasu Nippon- "Good morning Japan"

Hello everyone... We made it!  Audrey and I landed in Osaka yesterday afternoon around 3:30 p.m.  After getting through customs without a problem we met up with Mr. Honda, loaded up the bus and had a two hour ride to Himeji.   When we arrived we had a wonderful greeting from our new Australian and American friends that live in our complex.  After putting our bags in our apartment they took us to dinner at an awesome Udon noodle place that is right around the corner.  When we finished dinner we got settled in and went to bed around 10:30 p.m. Himeji time witch is 6:30 a.m. in Arizona.  After a few much needed hours of sleep we got up around 5:00 a.m. ready to hit the ground running.  Audrey found a closed to decorations that we bought from the couple that lived in this apartment before us so she has been flying around here putting up pictures, fake plants, vases and anything else she thinks looks "cute" in here.  We have a meeting at 9:30 and Mr. Honda is going to take us into the city to open our bank account and get some important paperwork taken care of.  Hope everything is going well for you in Arizona or where ever else this blog may find you.  Thank you all for your love, support and prayers. Check back with us soon so you can keep up with the exciting things we are doing in THE LAND OF THE RISING SUN!!!

Here is the crew just before we go through the checkpoint at Sky Harbor

From left to right: Audrey, Josh, Jane, Ding Ding, Emily, Rachel, Sianna, Patrick and Andre

No that is not Audrey sleeping on my shoulder!  Some random girl thought that I would be a good pillow.... YIKES!!!!!

Audrey can hardly wait to eat her airline chicken and noodles... 

cant you tell by the look on her face!

We're Home

I thought the name of this building was pretty great... 

but I was under the impression that name was reserved for studly Americans?!