Of course we have known about his plans to leave for quite some time now. For almost as long, we have tried our best to find a new tenant to move in to replace him. We had one potential prospect, a girl in our school who was looking for a new place. Things had pretty much already been decided with her, when she suddenly had a change of heart and opted to return to Sweden instead.
So back we were at square one. Our search for a roommate continued. Had March arrived with no new tenant in sight, we would likely have been forced to leave this place to its own destiny. There is just no way we would have been able to afford the rent if shared by only me and Legato. Which would have been a great shame, as it's really a place worth living in.
As it turned out, my first ever attempt to utilize Craigslist, only a few days before our deadline, turned out successfully. A day or two after the listing had been posted to the site, I received a mail from a couple from Vienna, asking about the apartment. Uriel and Clara were their names. After some further correspondence, we closed the deal, deciding we should meed in Shinjuku on the day of their coming to Tokyo. Which was today.
So right after school, Legato and I left for Shinjuku, accompanied by Helene, a girl from our class. On our way I got a call from Uriel (calling from a Payphone), telling us they were waiting at the South Exit of Shinjuku station. Should have been easy enough, right?
But of course it wouldn't prove quite that easy. Shinjuku station, for one thing, had got to be the most confusing station in Japan. Originally planned at a time long before it would become the bustling center of modern Tokyo - and one of the busiest train stations in the world - it is quite literally a patchwork of ever added segments and reconstructions, nowadays situated between/over/under/inside no less than seven or eight large department stores. Adding to that confusion, of course there just has to be more than one South Exit. See where I am getting at?
When we had finally managed to locate each other, we worked our way towards the Sakura House office to take care of all the paperwork. Dropping within Seven Eleven to allow our new friends to withdraw some cash for the initial rent payment, we ran into another problem. Their card issuer would not allow the transaction. Deciding to try out way at Shinsei Bank instead, Clara and I ran away to their Shinjuku branch - the same branch in which I opened my account a few days ago.
When trying to use a foreign card to withdraw money in Japan - even if said card is backed by a major, international company such as Visa or MasterCard - your options are quite limited to say the least. It's not that people don't use Visa here. As long as your Visa is issued in Japan, no problem! As long as it's not... well, then you do have a problem, unless you know what your options are.
Shinsei Bank. Citibank Japan. JP Bank (Japan Post). And Seven Eleven Bank. Those four will always take your card, on that you can be pretty damn sure. The most convenient of them is the last one, mainly because Japan is the country with the most 7 Eleven branches in the world, and in each one of them you will find the means to withdraw your money. But they also take a slightly inconvenient fee of 21o yen per transaction. Which of course adds up with the fee your bank back home takes for allowing a withdrawal from outside the EU.
In either case, 7 Eleven appeared to have failed us this time. Surprisingly enough, the same would prove to be the case with Shinsei. So scurrying halfway across Shinjuku to the Citibank branch that can be found there, Clara and I began to doubt whether we would actually get to see any of that money today. But as they had withdrawn ten thousand yen earlier this morning at the airport, using a Citibank ATM, we concluded that Citibank would surely be where our luck would return!
In a way, it did. While the same problem at first did occur, a member of the staff suggested that Clara tried to withdraw smaller amounts at a time. Amazingly, that indeed seemed to have been the problem. It was probably due to some strange limitation on the side of her bank. So a number of 20,000 yen withdrawals later, we could finally get on our way back to the others and on to the Sakura House office.
Where the Japanese paperwork bureaucracy set in to prolong our stay there long into the afternoon. Further, small things that elsewhere would have been solved in a minute or less has a tendency to be made overly complicated in this country, resulting in formalities like this taking much longer than they possibly should be able to.
Despite all these problems, however, nothing could reign in my great mood today! The sun was shining the whole way through it all, its beautiful, warming rays letting it be known that spring will soon be here for real. There was definitely something in the air, something that simply cannot be explained, making me feel freer and happier than I have felt in months.
Returning home, I was however somewhat disappointed to see that my package still have not arrived. That Swedish candy I am waiting for would have done wonders for my studies. But I suppose tomorrow has got to be the day then. And until then I guess I'll just have to make do with some more of this tea. Time for homework now, and then some further studying of kanji. I am really getting a hang of them now. Feels great, I have to say. I find myself able to read stuff I had no idea I could actually read. Really makes it all worth it. Now let's see how long it takes before I can actually start reading newspapers. They say you need to know almost two thousand kanji for that.
Again, wish me luck.
