moving

I'm moving to a new homestay family today. For some reason I don't have to be at work until 10:30a.m., so I'm hanging out and writing while Noriko takes care of the usual day-to-day business around the house. I try to help if I can, but a lot of the time it's just best if I sit back. For example, this morning I had gathered all of my trash from the last week and sorted it accordingly to burnable items, non-burnable items, and then my plastic bottles. I thought up until this point I had an OK handle on how the Japanese trash works, but, as usual, the Japanese way of doing things is not as simple as expected.

I went to help Noriko take out the trash, and went to empty the non-burnable trash into a bag. She stopped me and told me today was only for the burnable trash. She started taking the magazines I had placed in the burnable trash and said they would go out tomorrow with the newspapers as part of the "paper" trash. My plastic bottles would be put with the glass bottles and cans would go out on their appointed twice-a-month date. No wonder she has this written out on the calendar.

My moving date is also scribbled in on the calendar here. I've finished packing, and realized that I have WAY more souvenirs at this point than I thought I would. I also thought I'd have less money, too, but I've been pretty well taken care of in that respect. I already know I can't thank these people enough.

When I do go into work today I'm supposed to have an interview and lunch with two people from a Japanese newspaper. I found out about this yesterday, and although it'll probably be fun, I'm not looking forward to feeling dumb when I don't know what they're asking. The last interview I did was with someone from Bushu Gas, and he used a lot of words that I didn't know, but were synonyms for words I did know (i.e. different words for "study," "experience," etc.). He also had the worst kata-kana-ized English ever, so when we were talking about American actors or movies he would have to repeat the name or title a bunch before I could actually make the connection. I can't even count how many times he said "Eddie Murphy" before I realized what he was talking about. Maybe this will go better, though. And afterwards I don't really have anything scheduled I don't think, so I'll probably do the same thing I do everyday--try to figure out how I'm going to get back to Japan again.