It’s already Tuesday, August 16. I had a hard time getting back to sleep at 4am but I forced myself to lay there. I think I must have eventually fallen back asleep because I feel pretty rested. And Avalon’s fever feels like it’s almost gone! Yay. I had been thinking about taking her to the doctor today if she was still feeling hot. My list of things to do today include going to City Hall to register ourselves as residents of Minoh, going to the bank to get an account set up, and going to the phone store to sign up for Japanese service and getting off Verizon. International rates are knocking us out! $1.79 per minute because we didn’t buy an international plan. We just need to switch over.
Well we accomplished ONE out of three. But first… Christopher is here (all the way from Costa Mesa) and the boys are watching tv, watching their screens and generally not talking to each other. He slept over in Kaiyo’s room on the trundle bed. Plenty of room for visitors! The boys took a walk to buy more products for their You Tube video. Kaiyo and Christopher made a fun video sampling treats from Lawson, a popular Japanese convenience store.
Makiko, our friend from Tokyo, came by about 12. We met her on our first trip to Japan in 2013. We signed up for a free service called TokyoFreeGuide.com and we were paired up. It turned out, in our very very small world, that Makiko’s husband Hideki has several first cousins that live very near us in Orange County, California. One of his cousins lives about 10 minutes from my kids’ elementary school. We became friends beyond our initial tour guide experience in Tokyo. Later on in the Fall of 2013, Makiko and Hideki came to California for the first time and we invited them over to our house. We all went for a tour around Balboa and out for ice cream. Now we’re here in Japan and Makiko trekked out to see us in Minoh! Thanks for the yummy cake Makiko!
In the afternoon, we went with Andrew to the Minoh City Hall. We were there for 2 hours and it was quite an ordeal. A lot of Japanese was spoken and a lot of kanji was written and thank goodness Andrew was with us because I don’t know how we would have gotten through all of that on our own! It would have taken 4 hours at least! It was getting to be about 2pm and Andrew said most banks close at 3pm. He had to go to his bank as well so we headed there but the bank lady said she could not help us.
We went to Ikari, which is a gourmet supermarket, while we waited for Andrew to finish his bank business. Ikari reminds me of a gourmet supermarket in Panama called…? Something I can’t remember. But the layout and store goods were pretty much alike. Fancy imported stuff and sky high produce. The watermelon was 3800 yen! That’s about $38. Then we headed back home to eat our Ikari prepared foods (like Gelsons!) and get some energy back.
Around 4 (16:00) we realized that Shinsei Bank stays open until 5 and this is the bank I had wanted to check out because it supposedly has a lot of English services. So we hopped in the car about 4:20 to try to find Shinsei Bank at the Senri Chuo bus/subway station. It was a bust. We literally ran circles around Senri Chuo (a huge shopping complex in addition to station) and finally found it at 5:05pm. Too late!
At this point we know we need to return Christopher to his family and see the Biagis again. Avalon still isn’t feeling well so I stayed home with her. But Andrew generously agreed to drive all of the boys to the Umeda Train Station in downtown Osaka where the Biagis are waiting to meet up with John and company. They had their own adventure at the Sky Building. Nevermind John’s fear of heights!
Wednesday, August 17. We are on our own today. No visitors and Andrew has his own last minute chaos to deal with before he flies off to England for a year. We decide to take the bus back to Senri Chuo and open our bank account at Shinsei Bank. All 5 of us hike over to the bus stop (initially John leads us to the wrong side of the road from where we want to go. He’s got the right idea but since Japanese drivers drive on the other side it’s all backwards to us). We get on over to Shinsei and while we are there the kids wander off to the convenience store Lawsons and buy ice cream and Orangina. It’s like 10am. Then they find an arcade and play games while we are at the bank. Japan is full of stuff like this. One drawback: Halyard managed to mysteriously lose his earbuds between the bank and the arcade.
It turns out to do any kind of overseas banking, which is exactly what we need, we have to get an identification number before moving on. This requires going back to Minoh City Hall for the special ID number. The kids aren’t into that so on the way back we let them get off at an earlier bus stop and walk home. I hope they know the way home! The walk from Minoh Train Station, where the bus let us off, is about a 15 minute walk to Minoh City Hall. We get the identification number with the friendly help from workers that recognize us from yesterday. Now it’s back on the bus to Senri Chuo Station again.
There’s a security guard at the entrance to the bank who is very friendly. He opens the door for us, does a deep bow and shows us to a seat. When we leave he opens the door again and bows again. The woman at the bank is very friendly but she’s struggling through her English and that’s adding on a lot of time to this process. We are just lucky she’s got any English at all. She tells us we can pick out the color of our ATM cash cards and shows us a rainbow of selections. There are 32 colors in all! Then she says we can only pick from that day’s available colors, which is pretty funny because it’s still about 10 colors to choose from. So I have a purple bank card and John has an orange card. (Chan: this Clemson arrangement reminded John of you)
Long story short, we started this bank errand at 10am or so and ended at 5pm. No time for a trip to the phone store now. Tonight it’s spaghetti and corn on the cob. Both Avalon and Halyard passed out cold in their clothes.
Thursday, August 18. Today our focus is getting a Japanese phone plan. But first, a man from Shinsei Bank called this morning and apparently John forgot to write “Minoh-Shi” on one of his bank application forms and now he must get back to Senri-Chuo to write that one word on one of his forms. Ugh! “Shi” is the city part of Minoh City, which is of course, part of our address.
We are looking at three Japanese mobile service providers. They are NTTdocomo, au and SoftBank. I don’t know anything about them. Andrew says they use au because the sales people are not pushy. I guess he liked them because they didn’t switch. Later on though, he texted me and told me that he almost missed his connecting flight to Narita because it took him an hour to cancel his phone plan with au. I happened to mention via text to Mayumi that we are looking at phone plans. She says she works for docomo and if we’d like, she would call the store in advance to let them know we are coming and explain our situation. Sold! We are going to docomo. It turns out there is a store in the Mall that is about 5 minutes from our house.
The people at docomo are super friendly but they don’t speak much English. So they dial up the Call Center and I have to speak to an interpreter who serves as a go between for our entire transaction. We arrived at 17:00 and the store closes at 20:00. But at 20:30 I’m not done yet. So after 3.5 hours I have to go back tomorrow at 11:30am to finish up the phone business. I texted Andrew and told him he got off easy with only an hour.
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