Renting in Japan

Moving, moving, moving. It’s all I’ve been doing for over a month now. Renting a place in Japan while working for my company a rather long process. Once I reached a certain position and had been in a certain amount of time, I’m allowed to move out of the housing provided for me and into my own place. The usual process for a Japanese person getting a place is that they go to a few housing agents to look at places, since most agencies rent different places and very few listings are held by more than one agency. Once they found a place they like, they negotiate on price and appliances, such as if the tenant wants an oven or larger refrigerator or a washer, and sign a tentative contract to sign at a later day. They need to sign at a later date because the tenant has to pay what equates to five month’s rent in cash when they sign the lease. The tenant pays the first month’s rent, a security deposit, the agent’s fee, and renter’s insurance. Together with taxes, that comes to about five month’s rent in cash. Youch, that can take a few days to gather. My company adds some paperwork that took nearly a week to get back to me and a few meetings with American housing specialists. All in all my moving process took about a month and then another week to finally move all my things into my new place. These are pictures of my new place. The first one is my small hallway between the guest room and my bedroom, the next is the guestroom before I put all my craft things in it, and the third picture is of the loft above the guest bedroom. My kitchen/livingroom area is also a rather large room but already a mess from moving in when I took these pictures. Now I just have to slowly furnish and organize all my things. Umm, yeah… that could take a while. :)

The Wildlife Dome in Cairns, Australia

How many of you know what a bandicoot, frogmouth, or wallaby is? They’re all animals native to Australia and I got to see some when I went to the Cairns Wildlife Dome on top of a hotel and casino in Cairns, Australia last time I was there. The Dome is a mini-zoo with galahs and other birds flying around our heads and habitats for other animals that we could walk through. It’s a bad picture but as you can see I also got to hold a koala (which has bristly fur instead of the soft teddy bear fur most stuffed recreations have) and I got to see some kookaburras, a bettong, and a few sleeping wallabies (which look like small kangaroos when awake). Here is more on the animals at the Dome and here are more pictures I took in the Dome. I hope you enjoy the pictures and I highly recommend a stop at the Dome if you get to go near Cairns, Australia.

My Kuranda Trip

Kuranda is a tourist town in the Tablelands of Northern Queensland in Australia. I recently rode the Kuranda Scenic Railway up the Atherton Tableland, which seemed like a mountain but was really a high and rocky plateau. One of the greatest engineering feats of Australia, the railway was finished in 1891 and is now used entirely for sightseeing thanks to the road that was built to allow cars and buses to ferry people up. The two hour train ride was in an old fashioned train wide enough for a wooden bench that seated four people and a thin aisle to walk up. It stopped at a few places with great views and allowed us to get out and stretch our legs, get pictures, or read the information provided. After a gorgeous ride, we got to the town of Kuranda. If you like to get shop at expensive boutiques for one of a kind items or if you like browsing and bargaining at craft fairs, Kuranda is a great place to visit. If you aren’t in the mood to shop, try some of the wild life areas nearby. If none of those appeal to you, umm…, the food is really good. It was near the end of the trip so my friend and I didn’t have much money left to buy a lot but as we didn’t have much time before we had to get on the SkyRail and go back down the Tableland, we stopped at a deli for an amazing lunch and wandered the craft market areas. I bought a few beads and found a stall that sold wines made from mangos, not grapes. About two o’clock we got on the SkyRail to fly us down to the station the bus would pick us up at. We stopped at a few stations to get pictures of the rainforest plants and I even saw a peacock that nicely posed for my camera but eventually we got to the bottom of the tableland and went back to our hotel, one more trip done.

However, the next day we were planning to go to The Dome, a mini-zoo above the casino in downtown Cairns, and hold a koala as well as get lots of pictures. See you next week for that post. Click here to view photos I took on my trip.

Carnes, Australia

Cairns, Australia is a lovely tourist town not far from the Great Barrier Reef and a number of other attractions. Named Trinity Bay by James Cook, it started out as a port for the discovery of gold not far away but that function was taken away when a quicker route to Port Douglas was discovered and it became an agricultural port. In World War II Carnes became a port for both Australian and Allied Forces and combat missions were sent out from Carnes to support the Battle of the Coral Sea. After the War it became the tourist town it is today.
Not far from an international airport, Carnes is full of seafood restaurants, Asian restaurants, souvenir shops, and tour agents as well as being surrounded by hotels and resorts. I had a lot of fun in this laid back town and took a trip up to Karianda, which I’ll talk about next week. I also watched a magic show at the casino, where I couldn’t take pictures, and visited the mini-zoo on top of the casino, where I took a lot of pictures I’ll show you in two weeks.
If you’re interested in what else you can do while in this charming beach town, here is the link to their tourist site. If you plan to go down to Australia, I highly recommend planning a few days in this relaxed tourist hub.

My Trip To The Gold Coast

The Gold Coast in Australia is a resort area known for long beaches and 6 amusement parks just a short train ride from Brisbane. However, if you plan to go to the Gold Coast from the major city, remember to start early in the morning.
We got to the Brisbane train station after noon and the attendants got us tickets for one of the three main cities on the Gold Coast and we got on the train. The trip was an hour by train and then a bus ride. After a half hour or more on the bus, it seemed like we were leaving the tourist area so we got off the bus and walked around. We found some pretty beaches and lots of homes and hotels but nothing interesting or worth the trip. When we looked at the bus schedule, we saw that the last bus out of the area we were in was six thirty and it was already after five in the evening. There was no way we would get to the famous Gold Coast in time to do anything and get back that night so we got a snack at a convenience store and headed back to Brisbane to find supper.
We found out later that the bus trip should have taken about or over an hour and passed an amusement park. We got off well before that and so I realize this post says very little about the actual famous area. If you want more information on the Gold Coast, here is the official website and here is the link to my Flickr page with more photos from the Gold Coast as I saw it.

Brisbane, Australia

Brisbane is the capital of Queensland, Australia and one of the largest cities on the continent.

The first night of my stay in Brisbane I stayed at an apartment hotel and that is the way to stay. The apartment had two bedrooms, two bathrooms, one with a washer and dryer in it, a living room area with couches, a TV, and a dining room table, and a kitchen area with dishes, a microwave, a small stove and nice refrigerator/freezer. Very nice for a night away from work with gorgeous views of Brisbane from a lot of floors up.

The next morning my friends that I shared the apartment with and I left the hotel room and wandered around town. The y wanted to find a place to eat kangaroo but we finally settled on going to a market held daily along the river. The market was fun, although the level of goods seemed more like a mall than a regular market. We decided to stop for lunch at a Mexican place and I had tacos and a chicken quesadilla near a stone statue of a carnival performer suspended in midair by cables.

After the market we decided to go see Transformers 3 in 3D at the local mall. It was a very good movie but I must admit that the 3D part was a bit overwhelming. I still prefer the old experience where the screen was flat and you just watched the good show. However, times are changing and I’ll have to adapt, even if the movie gave me a headache. After the movie my friends were still looking for kangaroo meat so we got in a cab to a cowboy style restaurant. There we found out that kangaroo meat is more of a get-it-when-available- meat than a seasonal or everyday meat so I had an awesome hamburger and they had beef and we went back to our beds on the ship.

I went out to the city a few more times for shopping and food before we left. One thing I was amazed at was that the country was based off of England many years ago but was more like the United States than my image of England now a day. Australia doesn’t seem to have a “native food” like most of the places I’ve been. They have Mexican places, French places, Thai places, Japanese and Chinese places, the typical fast food places like Starbucks and McDonalds, and almost everywhere has an alcohol menu (not counting the fast food places of course). It was amazing to basically be back in the States again for a little while, although I don’t know anyone that managed to stay inside their budget during our stay in Australia. Everything is slightly more expensive there and we could buy things like clothes that we can’t find to fit us in Asian countries. Trying to find pants that fit Western bodies in the stores designed for naturally skinny Asians is just painful.

Anyways, Brisbane was a lot of fun and I’m definitely hoping/planning to come back before I die and I highly recommend it. Next week I’ll write about my trip to the Gold Coast so come back soon.

If you want to see more of my photos from Brisbane, check out my Flickr gallery.

Noumea, New Caledonia

Noumea is the capital of New Caledonia, a French Island in the Pacific Ocean. Although hard to get to by plane, the small city is trying hard to become known in the tourist world and is occasionally a stop for cruise ships around Australia. Although it has gorgeous beaches, lots of water for boating or fishing, and some nice boutiques, I really don’t have much to say about the city besides that it has awesome food and lovely sunsets. If you want a panoramic view of the city from a hilltop, here’s a great view and it will show a good depiction of how small the island is. True, this is much smaller than the island I was on, it gives the impression of a small island with little on it. If you love a small town where you can sun on the beach or eat amazing food while looking over the ocean, you’ll love it here. If you go, just remember that money goes quick here as it is a tourist city and the dollar doesn’t have much value overseas.