Keitai! – Sept 19th

There have been requests for photos of the house I’m staying in, so here are a few for you greedy readers. It’s also been made known to me that the comments were restricted to registered bloggers only, so I changed it so anyone can comment if they’d like. So fire away, it’s good to know that I’m not the only one reading this thing.

Today the world starts up again and we can go out to the kuyakusho for Shinjuku-ku to apply for our 外国人登録証 (foreigner registration card). I’m looking forward to getting mine, because I’m sick of carrying my passport around already! Alas, it would be another ten days before I can go pick the card, but at least we could get the proof of residence necessary to get a cell phone these days (登録原票記載事故証明書). Yukiko-san has generously offered to take me to make sure everything goes smoothly, and invited anyone else who needs help to come along. Josh, Hilary and Hans all need either a cell phone or to apply for their gaijin cards (or both), so they came along with us. We went down to Seibu-Shinjuku station and made our way to the kuyakusho, but not before I realized that we weren’t even a block away from the capsule hotel I stayed at last year. I recognized the street as we passed the only McDonald’s I had eaten at in the past decade (and still regretted).

After getting our registration out of the way, we went upstairs to apply for the national health insurance. For less than 10 bucks a month, I get about 70% of my medical expenses paid for. On top of the American insurance company we had to apply for before leaving, we should be covered for practically everything. It took a while to get that done with, and Yukiko proved to be very helpful. Daily conversation is one thing, but a lot of these officials use a set of keigo and vocabulary that I’m unfamiliar with.

Afterwards we went to pick out cell phones. Hilary already had one, but the guys all needed ones of our own. Again, Yukiko was indispensable. I was able to absorb most of what he was saying, but there were some points that I needed to ask about, and wouldn’t have been able to do without her there. We all got the same phone with ridiculous discounts. Josh paid 1 yen for his, I had to pay a bit more since the charger is sold separately. The main reason for cell phones around here is text messaging, so we got a good plan with plenty of packets. I’m going to have to do a lot of e-mailing to get my money’s worth out of all this, but with the student discount, it comes out to only about 30 bucks a month.

It would take almost an hour to activate the phones, so we shuffled around Shinjuku for a while. I still needed to get a bag, so I was looking around at the shops in the area. Everything was understandably overpriced: shopping in Shinjuku is not a good idea if you are on a student’s budget. Even the cheap-looking bags were over 6,000 yen. Afterwards we wandered back to the shop to pick up our phones, and since we all wanted to thank Yukiko for her help, we took her to an izakaya for a quick bite to eat and a beer. It was 5pm, so it wasn’t too early for a beer, right? We got pummeled with more irasshaimase’s in thirty seconds than I normally hear in an entire day. We had some fried chicken and Korean-style appetizers to go with a pitcher of beer while we thought about what e-mail address to choose for our new phones. I eventually settled on one, and pending a lot of “what the hell kanji is this!?” was able to set mine up properly. My phone is really neat, but there is no English function, which means I get to learn what all this crap means! Everything turns into a language lesson around here.