Today Michelle went to meet Reiko at the Kugahara station. With a small touristic detour trough Kamata she only arrived 10 minutes late. She was very happy with her iPhone with internet, otherwise it would have been a small disaster! The trains can be quite difficult even for a short distance. When she met Reiko at the Mizuho bank they went to a shopping mall called Lazona Kawasaki Plaza. It was very big with all kind of shops like a supermarket, some stores with household goods and even a section with cute little puppies! It is a good thing they are VERY expensive in Japan. And of course shops with clothes, which were reasonably priced as well. There was even a Muji store there, one of Michelle's favorite stores in Japan. It was a big help seeing all the cleaning material and what was available. The selection in the stores was very big and well organized compared to the little stores you find everywhere in the streets, also near our apartment. Reiko was a big help and explained everything and helped a lot with finding the stuff which we still needed. Some nice (and cheap!) kitchen stuff could also be found at the 100 yen shop. And she helped Michelle to get a point-card so she can collect points for discount coupons. In the bookstore Reiko found a great bilingual book for simple Japanese cooking witch will be a great help with cooking in Japan! Michelle also found a nice study book to improve her Japanese. After the bookstore they went to the part where you can eat all sort of stuff, the Food Court. This is a name that is often is used for a place were you can find all sorts of food in one place. After a nice lunch they went to the supermarket to buy the ingredients for Miso Soup, one of the recipes from the cookbook. Afterwards Reiko brought Michelle home.

The rest of the day Michelle enjoyed a few hours reading her new books (while listening to J-pop on the tv) before Dennis got home. Dennis found a notice in the mailbox for an undeliverable package. It was probably the bank card for our new account. Dennis' had asked someone to explain what the notice said and what to do with it and the best thing to do was to call the help desk. Not that the help desk understood English, but they did write down Dennis' number and after half an hour he got called back by someone who was fluent in English. She kept talking about picking it up at 10 or 11 and that she would call the post office to ask if it was really there. It took a while to realise that she ment 22h or 23h this evening and that she was sorry we could not pick it up earlier, because the delivery guy might not yet have dropped it off at the post office today. Really amazing to hear that the post office is open 24/7, even on national holidays (like tomorrow). We would have been satisfied with being able to know which part of the day they would try to deliver again, instead of this amazing customer service!