Sushi Stories: November 2010

I Will Sell This House Today...

Posted by Jess
20 Nov 2010

Or Not...

As most of you know, our house has been for sale since early May. We had wanted to sell the house anyway (even tried to a few years ago before Abby was in the picture) but its hard to keep a house clean enough for showings at any time when you have 4 people and a dog living in it! We decided that while we were away it would be a great time to put the house back on the market just to see if we could find our perfect match. We asked pretty much what we would need to break even on the house from what we bought it for and the money we put into the basement to finish it.

Well, it's been over 6 months now which means our initial listing has expired. If any of you are trying to sell your own house, you know that it hasn't been a very active six months. Although our feedback was good, we only had 3 second showings and no offers. Our price just couldn't compete with an identical house 3 miles away in foreclosure. So although we don't know where the next year of our lives will bring us just yet, we have sadly decided to take the house off the market.

There are a lot of things we love about our house and its the first one we've ever owned which means it has a special place in our hearts. However we were excited to think of the opportunity to upgrade when we return to Minnesota. Its hard to believe that buying a house 8 years ago doesn't turn out to be an investment, but something we've become a bit stuck with for at least a few more years. We recognize that there are so many worse ways to be stuck in this world though and we're fortunate that we can still afford the house, but still feel a little melancholy about taking it off the market.

Our house has someone staying in it while we're away so we know its in good hands and we're grateful. Come next summer we might be thinking about what color pink to paint Ella's bedroom, since that was a promise we made before we left!

So that's the update on the house. It was a hard decision for us to make as we give up a little bit of a dream for probably a few more years. And a shout-out to Debbie, our realtor, for helping with trying to sell the house these past 6 months. Someday we'll try again...

Kanpai!
Jess

11:19 PM | Category: | 0 comments

And the walls, come tumblin' down

Posted by Jess
7 Nov 2010

A few days ago we came to the end of month 3 here in Tokyo. My how the time flies. Over this past month we experienced our first earthquake, so I thought I would give a little Japan earthquake information for our 3 month post.

Our earthquake experience was very short and hardly noticeable. Jason and I were sitting in the dining room and the girls were both sleeping. It was the middle of the day, no music on, no TV. If any of these things had been different or if we had been walking around, we wouldn't have felt it. Jason noticed it first - just a little movement in his coffee cup. Then I felt it on my chair - it was as if a large truck had just driven past your house. We looked it up on Japan's Meteorological Agency website and sure enough - a little ways north of here there was a quake at that time and in our neighborhood, it felt like a 1 - which is different than a 1.0 on the Richter scale, but more on that later.

Earthquakes are very frequent here. According to an article on Reuters.com, Japan accounts for about 20% of the world's earthquakes that score 6.5 or higher on the Richter scale. In the past 5 days, there have been 4 quakes in Japan. So really, there are a lot!

The Japanese use the shindo scale for measuring earthquakes rather than the Richter scale. This scale measures the intensity that people actually feel at a given location, while the Richter scale measures the energy an earthquake releases at the epicenter.

The shindo scale ranges from shindo one, a slight earthquake felt only by people who are not moving (as we experienced), to shindo seven, a severe earthquake. Shindo two to four are still minor earthquakes that do not cause damage, while objects start to fall at shindo five, and heavier damage occurs at shindo six and seven.

The Japanese are prepared though. Part of orientation for Ella's school was to tell us where they would go in an earthquake evacuation (which area of a local park) and we have hard hats under our desks and earthquake drills at work. There are signs around town that tell you where evacuation zones are and where they are not - as in "No Evacuation Zone, Risk of Widespread Fire". We do not have an earthquake kit at our house, which is shame on us. I've been thinking lately that we should buy some extra bottles of water to keep around, but what are the odds we'd actually need it?

The Japan government also has an early warning system in place. They have some signs that a larger quake might be coming and so there are instructions on what will be broadcast on TV at that point and what to do. This could really only work though for the Great Tokai Earthquake that is expected (if it works at all).

The Tokai Earthquake is an earthquake that has happened regularly throughout Japan's history, about every 110 years or so. They estimate that the previous earthquakes ranked around 8.4 on the Richter scale. The plates that cause this quake are just southwest of Tokyo. The last quake happened in 1854. That's right people, do the math - that means its been over 150 years since the last one and they are supposed to come every 90-120 years. But of course, who knows? It could be a while yet - at least we hope so!

Thanks to the Japan Meteorological Agency, Reuters, Wikipedia, About.com and Go Japan for info for this blogpost!

Kanpai!

Jess

1:43 AM | Category: | 0 comments

I'm a little pumpkin, orange and round

Posted by Jess
6 November 2010

A little hiatus from blogging this past week, but we're back! Last weekend was Halloween of course and I wanted to post pictures and tell you about our weekend festivities.

Japan has only started celebrating Halloween in recent years. Prior to that, O-bon was the Japanese version, which is the Buddhist holiday of praying for your dead ancestors and happens in August. O-bon is still a big thing here too of course, but now they have added some Western Halloween traditions to October 31st as well.

There were various events going on in Tokyo over the weekend before and the weekend of Halloween, mostly in areas where foreigners commonly live. The weekend before Halloween there were parades that the kids could march in near our house but unfortunately we didn't know about it at the time! On Friday night, Oct 29th, I came out of the train station near our house to find loads of Japanese kids running from shop to shop on Aoyama-dori (a large cross street by our place) in costume. We hadn't heard that trick or treating was going on but clearly something was organized!

As I came into our building I asked the front desk and they said that trick-or-treating would go until 8:30. So we ate a quick dinner, threw on the kids costumes and headed out around 6:30. Unfortunately, everyone was out of candy! We were able to go to two stores that actually handed out candy and then came back to our apartment building. Our building always has a candy dish out so we asked the nice front desk woman to give our kids a piece as part of the trick or treating experience. She obliged and with three pieces in their bags, we called it a night. I wish we would have known ahead of time that this was happening - we would have been out there at 5pm! I guess that's why we should learn some Japanese as apparently the shops had signs in their windows the week before.

We had some very small pumpkins from the supermarket and since we were rained in on Saturday due to some typhoon effect showers, we decided to carve them and roast pumpkin seeds.

On Sunday we headed to a local shopping mall area where there was a party being hosted by Tokyo Family magazine. The party had face-painting, balloon animals (Ella asked for a blue sword of course), food vendors and carnival games. There was also a DJ, a Kids Disco entertainment group, a hula-hooping group with light up hoops, a fashion show, a costume contest and girl-band performance. Lots to do there and the girls had a good time. We got there a little late for the dancing (but the songs we did hear probably weren't all that appropriate anyway, like Ke$ha and Lady Gaga), but we had a good time watching the performers and playing the games. The girls spent the afternoon as Aurora and Tinkerbell and were a big hit with the Japanese. The girls were asked to be in many pictures with random Japanese children. Whatever trips your trigger I guess!

Around dinner time we left the party and headed to get something to eat. We came home exhausted from the day's fun. Definitely many lessons learned if we were ever to do Halloween in Japan again. But at least the girls were able to dress up and participate in similar activities that they would have in the States, that's all that matters!

Here are some pictures from the weekend's events.

At the party: