1st December 2006
We discovered the most amazing shop today called Tokyu Hands.
It sells everything you could ever want and a lot of things you couldn’t imagine owning, ever. From acupuncture needles to aquariums, piano wire to paper, kitchenware to kitten toys, chopsticks to chemistry equipment, it’s all here. I foresee many happy hours spent in this shop.
It also sold some Christmas trees and decorations, hurray!
So, we now have a Christmas tree (fake), but upon returning home I remembered that one of the few things I hadn’t shipped over from the UK was… Christmas decorations. Oops! The reason I hadn’t sent them was that I was bored with them and thought, incorrectly as it turned out, that I would be able to get much nicer ones here. So we will be having a minimalist Christmas this year, which pleases me after the chaos of the unpacking yesterday after the lovely empty space of the previous weeks.
We also bought a load of picture hangers so Tim was able to put up our many pictures and make the house seem more like a home. It’s amazing the difference that one job made.
The walls appear to be made of cardboard and large pictures have to be hung from wires suspended from a rail around the top of the walls. I suspect this has something to do with earthquakes, a subject I am trying hard to ignore for now. Smaller pictures go up with just a pushpin holding them.
Being British, I feel I have to mention the weather. The only grey day was the one on which we arrived, and since then the weather has been glorious. Brilliant blue sky, sunny, crisp and cold, each and every day. The trees are turning, showing brilliant reds, oranges and yellow. Ginko trees are dropping their bright yellow leaves like snow and there are many pretty little birds bouncing and chirping in the hedges outside. I need to get a bird book, but I believe they are White Eyes and a Japanese version of a Great Tit, although this one is pinker than the British yellow version.
