Kodaira

  We finally made it to Kodaira, the city we will be living in for the remainder of the trip.  It is completely the opposite of downtown Tokyo.  Everyone is relaxed and wearing their own unique style of clothing where in Tokyo it was extremely business oriented.  Its still interesting how little people look or make notice of us.  The house/apartment here is on the back side of Tsuda College.  It is an all women's college with about 2500 students.  There is one bedroom where they sleep with Marley, then a living/dining room with a kitchen table and an authentic Japanese table on the floor.  Then there is my bed (notice i did not say bedroom haha) I have a futon mattress tucked into a hole in the wall in the living room.  Minus the lack of privacy its not bad because I fit nicely into the space.  The only real pitfall of sleeping on the floor is that it is easier for bugs to get me! So far we have seen only 2 cockroaches thankfully but also some really cool small lizards.  They are about the size of my pinky finger.  OH and the mosquitos are eating me like a piece of chocolate cake! I have at least 25 between both my legs! Kelly and I seem to get bit every few minutes while Seth only has a few and Marley has none! They say the bugs should start to go away in a few weeks when the weather cools down.

We had our first earthquake two days ago in the middle of the night.  There was an interesting sense of calmness with us though thinking how its such a regular occurrence here.  In the few days we've been here I've eaten Chinese food, a doughnut with purple bean paste inside instead of jelly, whole baby squid sushi, and some type of almond extract mixed with a poached egg and an ice cube.  Its funny how you miss weird things when you are away but also eating weird chewy seafood of sometype in noodle dishes and it feels normal haha  I can also proudly say I have eaten everything with a chopstick so far, minus the soup for lunch.

This sign is from a starbucks in Tokyo