The first 3 days

*My first several entries are going to be much more narrative than hopefully future posts will be since everything is all so new to us*

We made it!   Actually we landed around 10am local time on Wednesday at Yakota Air Force Base, which is about an hour and a half north of Atsugi.   Bryan's "sponsor", the guy that is assigned to be his go-to guy, met us and gave us a quick briefing on the shuttle ride to Atsugi.  He had lots of good information and then once we checked in at the Navy Lodge, he gave us a tour of the base and then took us around outside of the base a little too.    The exciting part of that was getting "crack bread" (not sure what the real name is), which is a little loaf of sweet bread from a local bakery. It was, as advertised, delicious and I could've ate a lot more.  Good start to enjoying the local cuisine!

 Jet lag is a problem.  We thought we were doing okay until we were wide awake at 3:30 this morning.  And then it was completely daylight at 4:30am, so we just woke up.  Needless to say, it's been a long day.  It's only 7:12pm, but I swear it feels like at least midnight.  I hear it takes at least a week, usually longer to adjust.

Our hotel room is nice.  It's a rather spacious room with a little kitchenette and a nice bathroom and closet.  We've unpacked and hid away our suitcases since we'll be here several weeks.  

I've learned my way around about half of the base, which includes the multiple NEX stores, the Commissary (grocery store), the housing office, the food court, a few other restaurants, the gym, beauty shop, cinema, MWR (Morale, Welfare, and Recreation, where we can rent all sorts of outdoor equipment and book tours) and a few other places.  That's comforting :-)

In exciting news, we've already found a house!  We went to the housing office yesterday, learned how the process to live off-base goes (we learned that there is space on-base, but it wouldn't be nearly as spacious, strangely), looked through a binder of properties, called a landlord and walked down to his office.   We inquired about one place, saw it, thought it was okay, but much closer to the base than we really want.  The landlord told us about another property, which sounded great, but was out of our housing allowance by a bit.  He said it was on the market for a couple months, so they'd be willing to come down from 220,000 yen to 214,000 yen, so we took it!   It's a 2 story house located about a 5 minute drive/10 minute bike ride from base and about a 5 minute walk to the train station.  It's much more spacious than I ever expected.   It has 1.5 bathrooms (the shower is bigger than the standard, but still Japanese style and the toilets have lots of buttons...), 2 large bedrooms (even almost to American standards), nice size closets, and an open kitchen/living room/dining room.  It's relatively new (built in 2007) and has nice floors and finishes.    Sadly, it takes weeks to get the paperwork done and of course, our stuff is not here, so we will not be moving in for a bit.  We thought we'd have to look at lots of houses over several days, so finding one that we both really liked so quickly was a pleasant surprise.

Bryan has met several of his co-workers and seems excited about working with them.  None of them are retired (most of his Mayport co-workers were much older and retired private practice dentists), so our social life seems promising!   He doesn't actually start doing dentistry for several weeks though.  He's been going around the base, getting lots of people to sign off, saying that he checked in with them and he's in their system (or something like that).  Next week we both have orientation (see below) and then I'm not sure what else he has to do before starting to see patients.

Next week we'll attend orientation together.  The first couple days involve learning Japanese culture, then we learn how to drive on the left side of the road (this is what I'm currently most afraid of!)

Okay, now for some pictures.   There are a few I took around base and then our outing into town this evening for dinner.   Apparently I need to figure out how to get my webpages to come up in English, not Japanese.  I put .com, but it automatically switches to .jp. (50 points for Gryffindor if someone can tell me how to fix this!)  Some things are in English, but a lot are in Kanji, the characters.  I'm not familiar enough with this website to know how to upload pics.  I tried.   So for now, they'll be on Facebook, but I know a couple of you (hopefully there are more than 2 readers...) don't have that, so I'll work on it this weekend. 

 We're going to watch a movie and probably fall asleep very soon.    Enjoy your Friday!!