Getting up early went fairly well, since Dennis was half an hour too early at Canon HQ for his meeting with HR. He got an introduction at Canon, but also help with setting up a bank account and received a health insurance card. The presentation of the Health and Safety department was very typically Japanese and Dennis never expected that this would take almost an hour, but had a nice chat with her. It sure indicates how much attention Canon pays to this. Next s...

Today the items from Ikea would arrive sometime in the afternoon. Since it was possible they were earlier, we decided not to go somewhere in the morning. That meant sleeping in! We killed the time by cleaning up the house, emptying the last suitcases and watching some tv-shows we brought along on blu-ray. When the guys arrived late in the afternoon, they almost delivered the wrong stuff and of course continuously kept talking in Japanese. It's not like we even...

Today we awoke with a very strange smell in the living room, although all windows were closed. Apparently someone in our neighborhood was cooking something and the whole neighborhood could enjoy the smell. Normally we do not have something against Japanese cooking, but the smell of cooked greasy meat is not what you like to smell in the early morning on an empty stomach. Luckily the smell was gone after some time and we hoped this was an exception because of th...

Today (a very rainy day) we tried to find some stores (after we bought an umbrella) were we could buy us some beds. We had to get back in time, because of a phone conference of Dennis. The stores we originally planned to visit were just too far away for us to be back in time. So we decided to go to a nearby Muji Store instead and look what furniture they were offering. We took the train/metro to Gaienmae and on our way to Muji we spotted a bed store called Seal...

We went shopping again, this time for kitchen items. On our way to the station we found bagels that were actually made from whole wheat. They could serve as breakfast even. At Yodobashi we just bought a water cooker, maho bin (hot drink container) and blowdryer. We had to be back in time for the TV installation people, which installed the settop box for us. We can now not only watch tv, but also record it or get video-on-demand. We tried to find a local rest...