Moving day

So another milestone passed today as I moved out of my place in Oxford, dumping a vast pile of stuff onto my long-suffering parents. This move bore uncanny similarities to my work on the university's REF submission last year.

I'm horrified by the sheer amount of stuff I've managed to accumulate here. It's partly due to having hobbies that call for stuff (games), and substantially due to my reading habits. A lot of what I read is hard to come by in libraries, and so I tend to buy it or get it for birthdays, and then am reluctant to get rid of what was hard to acquire. I also have a lot of household stuff on account of living in two unfurnished flats. It's inconvenient to not have suitable kitchen stuff, for example, and while individual bits aren't that expensive, re-equipping a whole kitchen is not a cheap prospect.

This stage isn't quite over, as I have lots of unwelcome arranging-of-stuff to get done over the weekend. Just hoping for a good night's sleep to set me up for it.

Yesterday I had my final lesson with the amazing Naoko-sensei, which was a little melancholy. Seeing as it inspired me to move continent for six months, you can probably guess how much I've enjoyed our lessons this past year.

Weather forecast

I know the weather in Fukuoka will be a little different from what I'm used to. My visit to Hong Kong a few years ago was pretty unpleasant to be honest, and I'm expecting something similar for the first few weeks. It's been hot and humid in the southern UK recently, so I ran a quick comparison courtesy of the Met Office.

Just the ten degrees difference then...

I'm very glad I booked to arrive a few days early. Hopefully by the time the Monday rolls around I'll be physically capable of movement.

Boxing clever

What with having to ship all my stuff back to my long-suffering parents' house while I gallivant, obviously I need quite a lot of boxes. I had some when I last moved, but that was six years ago, so most are long recycled. Luckily I was able to scrounge a few (not enough, as yet) from work before leaving, but drawbacks presented themselves:

• It's a twenty-minute walk, enough to make your arms ache. If you don't believe me, try holding your arms out in front of you for twenty minutes.
• It's a fairly busy route with narrow streets full of A-sign advertising the shop you are literally right outside, beggars and millions of blasted bikes fastened to every conceivable surface - box-carriers are not welcome.
• It's fairly warm right now, so on the plus side not much rain, but carrying more than one box on top of my normal bag is unwelcome effort.
• Boxes are really annoying to carry!

While I was able to cart a few smallish ones home, bigger boxes are a problem - too tall to hoist under your armpit and hold with your hand, too big to squash up into a plazzy bag like the others, so what to do? Luckily, my supervisor had an idea:

Good old British ingenuity at its finest! A nice little lifehack I thought I should share.

1. Fold box down into flatpack
2. Fold box in half
3. Insert bag between halves of box
4. Wrap tape around box and through handle of bag
5. Carry home easily

I have a home!

The school have managed to sort out my living arrangements! They got back to me today with the address and details, including a set of rules. I'm a little concerned about the "thin walls" warning but it's probably no worse than the shared houses I've lived in, and quite possibly better.

Google Maps reckons it's about a 40-minute walk to the school, but that route isn't actually viable because it's across a pavementless bridge. However, I turned up a viable alternative with some digging around on Street View, although I'll only find out how viable once I arrive. Given the weather this time of year...

...I suspect I'll be getting the bus! There's nothing quite like getting to work soaked and sweating after a 40-minute march through rush hour traffic.

Cooking with gas

After continued frustration with insurance companies (short version: don't bother with Direct Line) I had a Monday off in lieu of weekend working. Keeping the old nose to the grindstone, it's actually been a very productive day. After a marathon 2-hour Japanese lesson (with a distressing amount of vocab forgotten) I nipped into STA Travel, where I was able to speak to a human being in person, and get insurance sorted in a matter of ten minutes - most of that reading out loud of obligatory financial regulation stuff. They weren't bothered about some counselling sessions a few months ago provided I wasn't on medication or regular doctors' visits. So yay.

I've also managed to pick up visitors' permits so that Mum & Dad can park the van they're bringing down to collect my stuff, and called in to check about getting some yen. In fact they had them in stock, and it sort of seemed easier just to deal with it rather than have to try and find another time to make the trip, so I did so. Walking back home was a bit alarming, I don't normally carry that sort of cash around with me, though it's not that much in the grand scheme of things. Enough to get me through the first week or so without stressing about cash machines.