i'm leaving japan in like 18 hours

This is SO WEIRD. Because I mean it's the first time I've left the country since moving here where I don't have a return date set.

I'm 96% packed :)

I worked on packing in the morning, and then Kozo came over today in the early afternoon and we got Anrakutei lunch special yakiniku. He came by to get some stuff from me -- a printer, vacuum cleaner, various other things. I also fortunately had an extra duffel bag that he could put it all in.

In the evening we went to Shinjuku. He went to drop the huge bag of stuff off at his house and I went to Yodobashi to spend some of my last points on an upgraded photo album. Then we had dinner at Rakeru and sang karaoke for a few hours.

I could say more about the day but I'm really tired and should sleep so I can get up before all the utilities folks show up in the morning to turn off various things in the house. (It's going to be pretty weird, I don't know when they will all come exactly, just "before noon". Having no electricity while still waiting for the water and gas people will kinda suck...

Oh yeah, there was a series of big earthquakes around 5:15pm. It was weird because Kozo and I were just talking and then he's like "Hey, the house is shaking." And it shook pretty hard and didn't stop for like a minute. But, oddly, I dunno, I just stood in a doorway and he just kinda sat there in the floorchair, both of us just kinda calmly being like "Hmm, this is pretty big, huh?" "Yep... definitely not wind shaking the house this time.." According to the earthquake sites it was more like TWO big quakes around 7.4ish each hit at about the same time, which is why it felt like one really long earthquake, and then there was a big aftershock about ten minutes later.

I just hope my plane can depart okay tomorrow... and that I can manage to get all my crap to the airport!

Oh man it's really almost final.

So, I'm heading out now to go take my internet thingies back to the post office, therefore I won't have any more internet here.

And since the Skyliner isn't running, Sam's supposed to give me a ride to a place that buses run from.

I heard that I may not actually be able to cancel my au phone at the airport, which has me really freaked out because I really, really, really don't want to be phoneless for a few hours in this state of things -- like if there's another quake and I end up stranded I'll be truly truly stranded. I'm going to go to the shop in a bit and basically find out if there's any other option besides cancelling it right then and there.

There was another big earthquake this morning that woke me up at 8:10 or so. Which was fine since I needed to get up but annoying because, well, the Skyliner isn't running because of it and the big ones yesterday. Sigh.

Anyway... I guess this is me signing off for the final time from Japan (unless I end up keeping my phone until the airport).

at narita

using the "free wi-fi sponsored by Google".

My plane boards in 20 mins or so.

So, since I last wrote an entry... I went down to send my internet stuffs back to KDDI (not too hard). At the postoffice I asked if they could forward my mail to the US and they said no, not even if I pay for it. Sigh. Not sure what to do about that. Mostly my residence taxes, I am a little worried about.

I had katsudon for lunch, it seemed appropriate for my last meal in Japan, I guess.

Then I stopped by the au shop, and they said that I COULD certainly cancel my phone at the airport. I think I may have accidentally used the wrong word when calling on the phone.

Came back to the house via a conbini where I got milk tea and a snack. Sam was just arriving with his car. Fortunately I had already put all of my baggage downstairs, so all we really had to do was put it into his car. Then I walked him around the house and pointed out the things like the keys, the trash, which stuff I left behind, etc... I guess technically if I make a trip back before he sells the house I could go grab some of the stuff there but in reality I kinda wrote it off as gone, so not a big deal.

And then we got on our way -- thanks to the Skyliner being down, Sam gave me a ride to the Tokyo Air City Terminal in Hakozaki, which I had never heard of before, but which has buses every 15 minutes to the airport. And thanks to him giving me a ride, this trip was SO easy on my back -- I got out of his car and put my stuff onto a cart, pushed that to the counter and bought a bus ticket and then pushed the cart to the bus, where baggage handlers took my bags and put them into the luggage compartment. The bus was fairly full so I sat next to some random guy who slept the whole way. I kinda zoned out too to be honest... though when we passed Chiba Marine Stadium I got kinda sad.

(As an aside, Sam's phone went off with an earthquake warning while we were driving... seems there was infact a 6.3 in Fukushima but we barely felt it in the car. Mostly I think you really just feel the quakes if you are in a building. There was just a quake in Fukushima again and I kinda sorta felt it here but mostly this airport seems very very very stable insofar as buildings go.)

Got off the bus and immediately put my stuff on another cart here at the airport, where I pushed it right up to the counter. Both bags weighed in at 22kg. Yay! (23kg is the limit.)

Now here is where my story sucks. I went to the au/KDDI store and went to cancel my phone.

Not only did it take like 40 minutes (thank god I got here at like 3:15pm!!) but... they first got confused because I also had KDDI internet, which they were able to confirm I'd cancelled and paid for. Then they made me pay 15000ish yen for something... which was my LAST MONTH bill for them?! I thought there was a mistake but what the hell could I do about it. THEN I had to pay another 15000 yen for not only this month but for a cancellation fee -- I thought that I was on a 2-year contract, and I'd had the phone almost 4 years, so dammit there shouldn't be any fees, but apparently since I keep changing my plan, that somehow interrupts that time period. Fuck fuck fuck fuck.

The REAL problem is that I simply didn't have that much cash on me. And they didn't take credit cards.

So I ran over to the UFJ ATM and it rejected my card and told me it was inactive. Which freaked me out. I then went down to the 1st floor to the Citibank ATM, and THAT fortunately worked. I was able to withdraw money and pay the scumsucking bastards at KDDI (okay, really, it was 4 women in suits acting all perky and apologetic, but I'm kinda angry anyway at having to pay like $400 out of nowhere).

And so my phone is cancelled.

What kinda sucks is that the pictures/sounds I downloaded from the Fighters site, including the Fighters theme song that I used as my cellphone ringtone, were ALL on the simcard, so they're all gone :( The pictures I had on there, and my emails, and my address book, are all intact, so that is good. Including the voicemails I'd saved, so I still have my father's last time he called to wish me happy birthday in 2008. (I really gotta figure out a way to save that somehow.)

Bleh.

Anyway, with that bitter taste in my mouth I went through security, which was completely empty and so very quick. Yay.

And well, here I am now, about to go board a plane and go to Seattle.

I feel very very strange, but I guess I'll get through this time somehow.

Also the pro baseball season started today here. Yokohama and Rakuten won. I love this kinda backwards baseball stuff going on lately. The other games at 6pm just started. I wish I was there... this year is going to be so very weird.

Guess I should give up my spot at the wifi counter and go get on a plane, huh.

I'm back in Seattle

I think I'm going through the same withdrawal I was when I came back here in January. It just feels like... I've gone from having 192340912034921 choices of what to do with my free time to having like... 2.

I mean, there are clearly plenty of things I can/should work on here -- like, getting all of my crap together in one place and then trying to get rid of things. And I have puzzle things to work on. And I could certainly do some writing and other catch-up on baseball things I didn't do when I was in Japan. And of course, I gotta find a job. But I mean, these all feel kind of like... work... tedious...

I guess the issue is just that, when I was in Japan, if I had some tedious stuff to do, it wasn't hard to figure out some plans so that I'd have a "hey, if I get this much done by 6pm then I'm going to go ________" goal to aim for, even if all I had in mind was a neighborhood of Tokyo and a kind of food I wanted to eat. Because I could just go walk around a lot and absorb Japanese, so even with vague plans, just by myself, I didn't feel like it was a waste of time.

But yeah, I guess part of the issue is that my diversions here just aren't as entertaining to me (mostly the lack of Japanese baseball games to go to, though I could certainly watch some of them over the internet, it's not the same).

To be fair, logically I know this year is a good time to not be in Tokyo, all things considered. It's just that logic doesn't mean you necessarily feel good or bad about a situation regardless of how good or bad it actually is.

Anyway, I'll be off to Spring Carnival tomorrow night (Mike is coming with me too) anyway, so that should at least be a nice diversion for a few days. I actually have very little planned for Carnival time... looks like I should actually get on Facebook and see what other people are up to.