Floor-cleaning Day

After resolving to start stretching at least twice a day in order to increase my flexibility for learning to dance, I decided I could not continue to work out on my hardwood floor in its current condition. At first, I was just letting go of my inhibitions about how clean the floor was when I moved in (and after two vacuums since), but I was also running into the problem of the floor being made of wood to begin with.


I really really can't touch my toes! Not even close! So here's a stretching update. I'll maybe try and keep doing this later on when I can start seeing more results. Here's how close I can get to my toes/how far I can get past my knees before I do warm up and stretching, and after! I'm always amazed at the difference! Hopefully these lines will both go farther and farther down throughout the semester!

Problems with exercising/stretching on a hardwood floor, as a foreign exchange student with few belongings such as exercise mats, etc.:

• It hurts.
• The only items to place on the floor to make it not hurt are my nice towels I use for the shower.
• It is questionable just how thorough a cleaning Uzuki-san had done on these floors before we arrived.
• The floor gets dirty really quickly.
• It's loud. I'm sure the resident below me is already sick of hearing me drop my cell phone/DS/books/heater remote on the floor every day, and I'm also quite certain he doesn't appreciate my 11:00pm fumbling around, trying to do warm-ups before I stretch.

So I decided that first, I would clean my floor with something better than just a vacuum! And second, I would buy either a cheapo beach towel or exercise mat or something to create a buffer between me and the wooden floor. So after noon or so, I headed out on my big adventure!

First, I had to find something along the way. In a new, more close-up map of our area that Uzuki-san had given us at orientation, I noticed there was a Christian church really close to the DK House. Before I left to study abroad (and as far as I'm concerned, before God would let me study abroad by getting my visa processed), I made four promises to myself and God about coming here. I filled one of them before I left, and it looks like finding a church to attend regularly will be the second. Since Sophia is technically a Catholic school, they offer masses at lunchtime throughout the week. I've only been to mass at a Catholic church once, and the experience was very very different for me (raised in a Southern Baptist church, attending a plain ol traditional Baptist church in Charlottesville), and I didn't feel like I gained as much from it as I might have a different style of church. I'm willing to go again, and will probably go to mass at Sophia at some point, but I do really like the routine of attending service every Sunday, so it would be super-great if this church nearby turns out to be a good place for me to go. Services will probably be in Japanese, which could be a good or bad thing! We'll find out tomorrow I guess =) I took a couple pictures of the sign out front and translated it at home to find that there's a 7am early morning service, and a regular one at 10:30.
My new church home for the next four months? Perhaps!


After that, I headed towards the main street and, although it was in the opposite direction of where I was going, I decided to go to Yoshinoya for lunch and see if they were still having their sale. It was over, but it was still about the cheapest lunch I was going to get. Today I decided to eat all the onions in my gyuudon! They're not as oniony as other places, so it really wasn't bad at all! And it made the beef last longer in the rice-to-other item ratio. I also sat at the counter there for the first time!

Next was my main destination, the Ito Yokado mall! I sure do love that place. I spent waaay too long in there though. Here was my list of items I was looking for:

• Athletic socks (I bought a bunch before I left for Japan, but I must've just left a big pile of them out of my suitcase somehow, because now it seems like I hardly have any at all. And some of my older ones are starting to get holes in the toes!)
• Athletic shoes (for running and dancing! The one type of shoe I didn't bring..)
• Sweat pants
• Laundry detergent (to hand wash socks etc. in the basins in the laundry room when I don't need to do a full load of laundry. And those washers do NOT clean socks very well... I may as well have just thrown them in a bucket of water and then taken them back out, that's about how clean they were)
• A swiffer mop type thing, for my big floor clean!
• A mat or blanket for the floor
• Tape (just plain old scotch tape!)

After picking out a blanket thing on the second floor, I decided to do the rest of my shopping before getting that big thing to carry around. I hadn't really checked out the third floor yet since it seemed to be mostly baby stuff and computers, but turns out half of it is a fabric/craft store! It was huuuuge, there was so much stuff! Their pattern selection was limited, and they didn't have a very wide variety of fabrics (mostly cutesy decorative stuff, not so much for clothing), but they had about every notion you could imagine! I was super impressed and surprised.



Obviously my favorites, but a biiit out of my price range!

The fourth floor is where I spent most of my time. I found a swiffer-type mop thing and the sheets that go on it pretty easily (all for a total of 210 yen!! I couldn't believe it. And DK Friends, if anyone wants to borrow it and some sheets, feel free!), and I also found some S hook things that I decided would be awesome to have to hook over my dresser doors, since there's nowhere to actually hang anything like a coat or jacket in the rooms. I had to concede with a decorative tape dispenser that already had some tape in it, because they didn't seem to sell just cheap, simple tape dispensers like we do. Then came the difficult part... where's the laundry detergent?? I found a shelf-end display with all sorts of different fabric softeners and other items, but I couldn't find anything that was obviously laundry detergent. After a good 10 minute investigation using my DS, I discovered that several of them were detergent, but they all had a note on the back that said NOT FOR HAND-WASHING (basically). Arrg.. I'm not sure if that's not a common item for Japanese people to use or if I was just looking wrong or what. I guess I'll have to try somewhere else!
View from the fourth floor. I wonder what city it is off to the left with the super tall buildings?


Walking through that store, you just start getting to thinking that everything looks like it would be a good purchase. Especially in such a bare room where you start missing the little things that are just kind of always around, like tape or a stapler, or paper towels, or paper clips... I need to keep telling myself that I'm only here for four months, and that I have to deal with all the stuff I've bought when it's time to leave, and not "If I had that cute basket.... I could put things in it!" So far I've been really frugal about buying things (besides food), and I've only bought the things I really need. I think today's swiffer mop and blanket purchases were probably my most unnecessary so far, but they only totaled to about $16.

After the fourth floor, I found one of the shoe areas to have a pretty good selection of American brand running shoes that I was familiar with, so I hopped back over to get my new blanket and some athletic socks so I could try on some shoes. The first ones I tried were a pair of Asics, which I've had good luck with in the past, and they fit so nicely! They were soo cushioney in the heels and felt like a good solid shoe. I asked the store guy (in really awful Japanese) if they had the match to this shoe ("I will buy this shoe.") but unfortunately, the single display shoe was the only one they had in that size. What? Ugh. So I went on to try just about every brand of shoe on that they had, but the sizes were all kind of weird, and all the Nike ones were only in wide, and none of them fit as perfect as those Asics! There was no way I was just going to give in and buy a crappy pair of running shoes for $39, so I took a picture of those Asics and I'm gonna find them somewhere else, darnit. Buying running shoes is serious business (just ask my mom!).I will find you!!

That was all the shopping I needed to do today, so I went on home. It was nice to have walked outside in the sunshine and nice day, and I had listened to my mp3 player along the way there which was very therapeutic. When I got home, it was time for my super clean floor mission. I cleared everything out of the way and vacuumed really good first, and then I swiffered the floor twice. It wasn't as gross as I thought it must've been, but there was a lot more dust than I expected. I felt pretty confident about the cleanliness and put down my new yellow blanket! It fits pretty well in the space between the end of my bed and my fridge, and it looks like I'm about to have a picnic all the time! I'm glad to have utilized that space now for sitting or whatever, cause it was pretty much useless before. I'm going to go absolutely nuts when I get my first non-dorm, semi-permanent living space to shop for and take care of. Those floors will be spotless on move-in day, with a nice rug on them the next, and a high quality vacuum purchased ASAP.The rest of the night I've been just hanging out, looking at some of my Japanese homework, aaand not much else. I just went to Yaoko for some dinner, and got the Shaka Shaka Chicken from the McDonald's there. It was on the dollar menu, so I got two. I'm not sure if they're selling this in the U.S., but basically it's like a round chicken strip type thing, and it comes in a bag, and you pick which seasoning you want, put it in the bag, shake it up, and now your chicken tastes better. I didn't really understand the concept, so when the lady asked me what seasoning I wanted (or some combination of other vocab words I don't know), I had to wait til she started listing them off, at which point I chose cheese because it was the only one I understood and could recite back, haha. Even then, I didn't know what kind of cheese I'd be getting, it turned out to be like a powdery cheddar cheese seasoning packet. I was going to eat it there, but it was so hot that I figured I could do the rest of my shopping and be home by the time it was edible, and I was right. It wasn't bad, but you definitely have to be in a setting where you can shaka-shaka without inhibitions in order to get the seasoning to be evenly displaced.

I also picked up some snacks, despite my no-snack policy that I instated last night. I added up the amount from my expense report that I had spent on food so far, and it was almost $200 which really surprised me. I wanted a reference for how much that was, and it was more than the UVa dining plans work out to per month (which I suppose isn't too bad, it wasn't too much more), but it still seemed like a lot to have spent in less than a month on just food! To get another comparison though, I divided the total by 16, how many days we had been here, and it was only about $11 per day. Sophia had suggested that students expect to spend about $18 a day on food, and that's how much I reported in my financial aid applications, so I should technically be doing fine as far as food spending. I think it's just that I've never really had to think about day-to-day food spending, or really have any idea how much it costs, and I'm living in Tokyo, so seeing $200 for two and a half weeks just caught me off guard.

So I got some snacks. Again. It was interesting to go to Yaoko in the evening, because all the bakery and sushi items had apparently been marked down and consequently all bought up by the customers, so everything looked really bare. We should try and go sometime in the early evening and catch the savings! I figured I'd be needing at least something more for breakfast in the next few days, so I found some "Chocolate Bread", which in this case is a roll of the dinner roll type, filled with chocolate cream! I already had one and it was really really good, sooo...those might not last long. I think the reason for my sudden addiction to all things chocolate (it was just a preference before) is the wider variety of delicious chocolate-based items here. In America, I don't really think of anything past like.. chocolate cookies or ice cream or pop-tarts, or maybe donuts and things like that. Here, there is a plethora of new and exciting choices, but I think I'll write more on that later.

I'm off to stretch!



"When you make a vow to God,
do not delay in fulfilling it.

He has no pleasure in fools;
fulfill your vow.

It is better not to vow than to make a vow and not fulfill it."

Ecclesiastes 5: 4-5

Funny how some verses show up right when they need to.. =)