The first thing on my to do list is buy a bed

Followed by a pillow, then maybe some sheets.

The reason being I have an apartment but no furniture. Last night I slept on a thin sleeping pad -called futons here but these aren't anything like the American kind.

I moved into my new apartment yesterday, concluding a rather stressful 4 week search. I'm pretty happy with the result, a coworker who transfered to Japan with me and I decided to get a place together to save money. We managed to find a relatively spacious 2LDK ( 2 bed rooms, living/dinning/kitchen room) in Hatsudai. Here's the view from my new window.

The tower to the left there, is the Tokyo Opera City city tower, in the lower right you can see some stairs that are the entrance to our building. Hatsudai is located one train stop or about a 20 min walk west of Shinjuku, one of the major centers in Tokyo. I'll be writing about Shinjuku a bit later, it's a pretty wild place. We picked the location because it was convenient for our commute and from Shinjuku you can get almost anywhere in Tokyo fairly easily.

A view of our street. Lined with lots of small shops, restaurants, cleaners, etc.

So here's the tour of the new apartment, you enter into a short hallway.

The bathroom and toilet are on the right.

The toilet itself is probably worth a post in and of itself.

Does your toilet have a control pannel? Don't worry if you can't read the button labels which are in Japanese there are illustrative pictures for each function.

The top button at least is labeled in Katakana as ビデ or "Bi de" (for the native english speakers out there pronounced "bee-day"). The toilet features a heated seat with several different temperature settings. One of the smartest features of the new toilet is the water basin on top. When you flush the toilet, the water starts running automatically allowing you to wash your hands with the water being used to refill the toilets tank. I thought that was an ingenious idea to conserve water.

The heart of the apartment is the common living/dinning/kitchen area. You enter at the end of the short entrance hallway.

The glass door in the back leads out to our small balcony. Here's the view of the room from the glass door. You'll notice we have literally no furniture, or a refrigerator for that matter - items also on the to do list.

And lastly here is my room. Certainly smaller then my room in Boston, but not small by Tokyo standards by any means and it's bright with large windows.

Now all I need is a bed...