Sayonara #2

I spent Thursday and Friday morning packing up stuff maniacally (now there's a word I haven't used in quite a while) and followed Geoff's advice (my soon to be skipper) "if in doubt, chuck it out" but it was still so hard. I had been living in this apartment for two years, almost to the day, the longest time I have spent in one abode for a very long time. Naturally there was a huge accumulation of stuff.

Kumiko San, Yukari San, Reiko San and Chiu San all came over shortly before lunchtime to help out. And they were all fortunate enough [sic] to see me at my most relaxed. The biggest dramas of the day were trying to sell my stuff, especially my fridge, to second hand stores, and figure out how to ship my bike. It turns out, that since buying my fridge second hand, new laws have been enacted in Japan which means that second hand stores can only legally buy stuff with a specific serial number, which my fridge didn't have. At one stage it looked like I was going to have to PAY the equivalent of $70 for the privilege of recycling it. At that point enough was enough and I decided it was lunchtime. Stress levels were rising at the same rate my blood sugar level was dropping and I needed to get out of the house.

After lunch we investigated shipping my bike up to Okazaki. I went over to the bike shop where I had bought my bike, and where the day before they had promised to set aside a bike box for me. But the shop was firmly closed. Aargh. Luckily I went back later and they had me a box, and good news, it was somewhat wider than your normal bike box. A sure way to reduce me to tears is to give me a box and bike to put in it. Its an engineering impossibility! Then I had to move it. In Japan they have this really neat courier service called hakyubin, where companies will transport stuff around the country for comparatively minimal rates. But again, large boxes seemed to be exempt from this and the first few quotes I got were around the $80 mark. If I was going to ship it down to the airport and bring it home, I thought it would probably cost a similar amount and the bike wasn't really worth that much. Finally we found out (or my excellent friends did) that if I took my bike to the main depot in the area they would ship it for about $30. Even better the box was so big I managed to stuff a bunch of other stuff into it as well!

They all divvied up my stuff and we ran a mock auction for some of the nicer furniture I had picked up and my plants. Reiko fell in love with my favourite cactus and decided to call it "green." My cool little succulent that has an amazing purple stem like flower with other little flowers that branched of it we called Yukari, which means "purple" in Japanese. They were all on strict instructions to love my plants with extreme care and attention!

Meanwhile Chiyu talked to the guy who runs the community centre and they were quite happy to take my fridge off my hands. They even arranged to come and pick it up the next day. Yattah!
Then followed final goodbyes with these beautiful students who had become good friends and I managed not to cry.