I choose you Pikachu!

I finally saw a Pokemon. Although not that horribly popular over here like it used to be, some kids apparently still enjoy the Pokemon. I tried to catch it in my poke ball but he was too big. :-( Alas...

So Markian and I took a trip over to Diamond City to go shopping for cheaper furnishing. Diamond City is a western style mall (or as close as you're going to get to it over here). Apartments in Japan come totally unfurnished. Usually no light bulbs, no stove, no fridge, no anything..... So, it can be very costly to get yourself set up. All the washers and fridges we'd looked at before were very, very expensive and a friend of us told us if we went to Diamond City we could get things cheaper. Also, I guess I should mention, you have to pay a deposit of 3 months rent, + a 50,000 yen agent fee + a 20,000 yen apartment insurance fee. So, you can see how you'd be broke after this and why I would want cheap furnishing. Also, in other areas (thank goodness not here usually), you pay "key money" which is basically a bribe to the landlord to let you live there (can be around 1000-3000 bucks US that you'll never see again).

Diamond City is in what I guess you would call the the suburbs of Hiroshima. I'm trying to be cheap with all these huge apartment costs, so we decided to walk to Hiroshima Station instead of taking the railcar. That took about an hour and then we had to figure out how to catch this bus with no English on it to Diamond City. It was a free bus, so I was determined on taking it instead of the train. Long story short, we figured it out and ended up on the right bus.

The Pikachu and Godzilla pictures were taken at an arcade in Diamond City connected to this music store that had tons of guitar stuff that my sister would have loved. The lower Pikachu picture is what the inside looks like where you play the game. I was going to crawl in the Godzilla, but I was a little big and thought I might get stuck.

We did find cheaper furnishings here at Diamond City and we're going back on Sunday to purchase them, hopefully. We may be able to bring someone for translation help, as a friend of ours has volunteered his pregnant Japanese wife as a translator, which is really, really nice. I was wondering how on earth we were going to negotiate delivery! We move into our apartment on Thursday! At that point updates will be spotty for a bit, as I won't have internet until we get things figured out/and until we can afford it. These apartment costs are killing us!