New Apartment and Breakfast

   Last time I said I’d talk about the breakfast choices at the hotel, and I will, but I really want to talk about my NEW apartment.  I’m sitting here typing in my NEW apartment, and enjoying the view over Tokyo Bay from my NEW apartment.  Did I mention that I have a NEW apartment?  OK, breakfast . . .

   At the Hotel New Yokosuka (as well as other hotels where I have stayed here in Yokosuka) there’s definitely a melding of cultures when it comes to the free breakfast they serve.  Since the hotels I have stayed in here are close to the Navy Base, and have a relatively high percentage of fellow “gaijins”, you can usually get eggs to order.  Of course there’s toast, butter, and jelly, but with Japanese bread, which is about 1.5 times bigger, and a little thicker, than a typical slice of US bread.  And usually there’s sausage, bacon, or ham, and corn flakes with milk, and orange juice, and fruit.  Then the fun starts.  There’s also a large cooker with rice in it (to which you can help yourself with the “rice paddle”) and a pot of miso soup.  To accompany the rice, there are Japanese pickles made of tiny cucumbers, “daikon” radish, seaweed, or salted plums.  Often there is a vegetable or vegetable medley (usually with broccoli), and a chicken or pork dish.  Sometimes there are “shumai” (basically Japanese potstickers), and sometimes deep-fried cutlets of chicken or pork.  Oh, and usually a green salad with your choice of dressing.  

   So the bad news is that I don’t really know what Japanese people eat for breakfast.  Is it the things we got at the hotel, or was that just what the hotel thought we gaijins wanted/needed?  I noticed that the Japanese folks who stayed at the hotel seemed to eat a cross-sampling of the offered fare, not unlike we gaijins, but maybe it was a novelty to them to have eggs and sausage for breakfast like it was odd for me to have miso soup and shumai.  More research is in order.

   I’m very excited about my NEW apartment (but you could probably tell that earlier).  It’s a three-beer story about the ups and downs of arranging the lease, so if you buy me three beers the next time I see you, I’ll tell all.  The short version is that I went through the Navy housing office on base, found the place, and signed the lease.  It’s a two-bedroom apartment and is $3,200 a month (depending on the yen conversion rate).  In order to sign the lease, I had to come up with the first month’s rent, and the agent fee, landlord fee, and the security deposit, all equal to one month’s rent.  So when I went to the bank to convert dollars to yen for the lease signing, I felt rich, because I walked around with a MILLION yen for a day.

   The apartment is in the Miharucho section of Yokosuka, and is right on the water.  I have a small two-lane road right in front of the apartment building, then a sea wall, then Tokyo Bay.  I can see some of the buildings on base up the coast, and I look out on Sarushima (Monkey Island) about a mile away.  Off in the distance past that I can see some of the tall buildings in Yokohama (still on this side of the bay), and directly across the bay I can see the refineries on the Boso Peninsula in Chiba.  Tokyo is a very busy port, and I can see out to the ship traffic lanes.  Through binoculars today I scanned the bay and from one end of my view to the other, saw 99 boats or ships, not counting the small boats tending the fishing nets.  I saw freighters, container ships, liquid natural gas ships, car carriers, and LOTS of fishing boats.  At night I can see the lights of passing ships, and the blinking lights of the buoys that define the traffic separation scheme.  The photo is of the full moon over the water, with ships in the distance and the lights from Chiba.

   On the seawall in front of the building there are fishermen pitting their wiles against the denizens of the deep (and from what I’ve seen, not succeeding so well).  The largest thing I’ve seen on the end of a line so far has been a six-incher.  Then there’s the question of whether it’s wise to eat anything that one would catch out of Tokyo Bay . . .

   I met my next-door neighbor today; he’s a gaijin who works at the Naval Hospital in the anesthesiology department.  Good guy to know if I want to knock myself out, I guess.  

   I’ve been riding my bike or taking the train back and forth to work so far.  If I take the train, I walk about 10 minutes to the Horinouchi train station, ride the train two stops (130 yen, or about $1.73), then walk about 15 minutes to the office; all in all about 35 minutes.  If I ride my bike, I can make it to the office in 20-25 minutes, and it’s all level.  The streets are busy, but the main road I take has a bike/pedestrian sidewalk that means I don’t have to ride in the street hardly at all.  Having a bike at work also helps in that if I have to get around base, I can ride rather than walk.  The base is pretty spread out, so the mobility really helps.

   Enough for now, next time I’ll talk about sightseeing and the Japanese fondness for anything in English on their products.