I made this little map to show our location in relation to other stuff-- I love maps! The red line is the route Izzy goes to work-- just a straight line south. It takes 5-10 minutes by bike depending on traffic lights. Note the supermarket on the right side. Sadly the closest train station is pretty dead-- it used to be a busy place but Wakayama has had a bad economy for a while. Best thing about this station is that it goes straight to Namba Station in Osaka in 1 hour. Namba is the heart of Osaka and has millions of restaurants, stores and tourist attractions in case we need to get away from the 'country'. But it's just expensive enough (round trip for $18) that we wouldn't just go whenever we feel like it-- need a good reason to go.

This is a zoomed out map of Wakayama. I left the red line from the other map in this one to show scale. The city is split into 2 sections by the Kinokawa River. The southern part is really old and has been around for a long time--since at least when Toyotomi Hidenaga-- Hideyoshi's brother-- (re)built Wakayama Castle in the 16th century on the site of an even earlier castle (thanks Wikipedia). The south side used to be the bumping area with lots of tourism and shopping streets, but now a lot of old businesses have closed because of the bad economy. The new happening spots are all to the north of the river where there's lots of land to build enormous malls and supermarkets and stuff. So we have to ride our bikes across the river to get to all the good stuff-- it's kind of far =S We're thinking about eventually getting a car.
You can also see here the 2 main train stations-- Nankai Wakayama City Station and the JR (Japan Railway) Wakayama Station. Since we are so close to the Nankai one we rarely go over to the JR one though.

Here is a picture of the Wakayama City Hall (this isn't my image -- I stole it from Wikipedia!). It's a pretty nice building as far as government offices in Japan-- most of them are pretty old and nasty looking to make the taxpayers feel like the government isn't wasting their money. The city hall is right across from the castle and Izzy works on the 10th floor so he gets some nice views.

Here's that view I mentioned.

With zooooommmm~ We fail at being good Wakayamans because we haven't even been to the castle yet hurpdurp. But we're going tomorrow!!

In this direction is the Sumitomo Ironworks/Factory. It's really long because it makes steel pipes in a special extra strength way-- instead of making pipes in 2 halves and fusing them together, they make really long steel rods and bore out the middles to make really long and strong pipes for extreme applications-- these ain't no average pipes.

Here's a view of Izzy's office (the International Affairs Division) from the front door as you walk in. Izzy's desk is where that blueish chair on the left side is. Hierarchically, the closer to the door you are, the newer you are and the highest ranked people get near the window. The people in the office have been really nice and helpful in getting us settled in.

A more direct view of his desk. As you can see, Japanese workers don't really get their own cubicles-- everyone's desk is put together in the center except for a few of the head people. As small and cluttered as this office may seem it's a million times better than many other Japanese workplaces we've been too! I'd also like to point out Izzy's computer-- it's that ancient laptop brick there.

Here's Isidro in his natural habitat with a coworker. Wakayama wootwoot!

Some more coworkers. Everyone looks so happy to be there =D

Right next to Izzy's office is the International Friendship Salon where they have meetings and foreign language lunches. Izzy runs the free English language lunch every Wednesday in here. Local people come between 12-1 to speak English with Izzy (and me) during lunchtime. I like to come to the English lunches to help out and the Chinese one too to brush up on my terrible Chinese. I wish they had Japanese lunch... that's what I really need help with =P

Most days Isidro gets a bento for lunch. Everyone generally orders the same bento. There are a lot of bento places around the city hall area to feed all the government workers. An average bento example would be fried chicken with mayo on top, instant miso soup, a cabbage salad, renkon hasami (two pieces of lotus root with ground beef in the middle, deep fried) and always with some kind of rice on the side. It's kind of an unspoken rule that everyone eat lunch at their desk, but Izzy is free to go out if he wants. This picture shows the cafeteria on the 14th floor that's another option.

A view inside the cafeteria-- it's actually more like a restaurant because waitresses serve you.

Here's one of Izzy's best buddies-- the vending machine on the 14th floor. You can measure his level of exhaustion by the amount of canned coffees he buys per day-- none means he's completely fresh, 1 means he's a little tired, 2 means he's really tired, and more than 2 means he's a walking zombie.

So what does Isidro do at work? At first he was doing lots of fun introductory stuff around the city like going to museums, visiting schools, other government offices and even some weird stuff like visiting the city sewage plant and a crematorium. But now things have gotten busy and he has a lot of work to do. Here you can see some of his coworkers ridin' dirty on battery-assisted bikes. The city hall lends these out to government workers when they need to go somewhere as part of the movement to be eco-friendly.

Here's an exhibit at a museum that showed lots of old electronics and household goods. It's important for Izzy to know all about the history of the city so he can be a knowledgeable employee.

This is pretty cool-- it's an early refrigerator made by the Kirin beer company. Every day you'd need to get new ice and put it in the top drawer there and use the bottom drawer for storage.

One of the more fun days out included a trip to the planetarium where Pokemon characters take on a magical journey to the stars!!

For the first few weeks we had a bunch of parties to go to. The Japanese are big on having welcome parties, so we had 3! Also at the same time an intern in the office was having his birthday/going away parties so that combined with ours to make for party madness. We got to eat some really nice meals because of it.

This party was at a local French restaurant with all the people from Izzy's office. Everyone looks so shocked XD

This is a view of the outside of the building. Our apartment is on the 1st floor.

Come on in!

We've got a shoe closet on the left there (no shoes in the house!) and a toilet closet thing.

Mmmm closet space for our multitude of clothing~

Our 'dining room table' which currently holds a bunch of stuff including a pet goldfish.

Look at this fat greedy creature.

The balcony where we hang out the clothes to dry. I miss dryers!

The kitchen. Got 2 burners and a half-size fridge yay-- that's an upgrade from other Japanese apartments we've lived in.

Hey look! It's a door! A door to what you say? A shower-- in the kitchen!!

Ew the shower. It had a lot more black mildew when we first got here but we have been vigorously battling it with potions and ritualistic chanting.

Out the other door in the kitchen is a tiny backyard. Surprise! This is a luxurious place.

This is the third room-- the computer/hangout room. We've started eating our meals in here in front of the TV like real Americans haha

We are the world~ we are the children~ we splurged on cable TV so we can watch a ton of channels including 80s music videos like this one. Izzy bought that Sega Saturn for 300 yen ($3).

Fourth room-- the bedroom. I'm very happy with this bed-- we just bought it because the old one was just too hard and small. We even have a box spring mattress underneath-- that is just decadence in this country.

And the best thing of all? Look at this enormous closet O_O

What's the worse thing about going to Japan? The plane ride... but all of these people look excited.

Lucky sleeping people. I slept for about 5 of the 13 hours which is pretty good I guess.

I'm obviously inserting this pic because I like the way I turned out

Isidro, however, looks exhausted

Here was our friendly neighbor, David Shaw. He's now in Gunma.

This girl was very EXCITED to GREET us and TELL us all about ORIENTATION!!!

This guy's cool.

Our room was a pimp palace.

Nice views too-- nothing beats Shinjuku~

We should've eaten here to represent Florida... but we had ramen instead.

Free breakfast and lunch for JETs were served everyday. We ate with the Florida people on the first day.

Here's the 'Western' breakfast buffet. Someone was a little confused about exactly what Americans eat for breakfast so here you can see some strange items including mixed vegetables and french fries hehe

Orientation's about to begin! See if you can spot Isidro...

Look at this awesome wall art thing. It was cool.

Our friend Caleb got to come to orientation as a TOA (Tokyo Orientation Assistant). He's been on JET for 2 years as a CIR and was showing us the ropes like a real sempai. This is the CIR panel aka 'show off your Japanese if you're awesome or otherwise feel like an idiot' panel.

This hotel is luxurious-- look at this color changing ceiling!

More of the hotel-- lobby.

There was this plant-y display too-- with real plants wow! (I'm easily impressed)

That evening we went out with all of the new Wakayama JETs to go socialize. We went to the Tiki Room on the other side of Shinjuku station so we had to walk over. On the way, me and Izzy spotted this amazing sparkly hime-gal frozen yogurt place! I need some~~I don't even like frozen yogurt lol Notice the Razzle Berry sign on top is made of plasma screens that coordinate to make interesting effects and grab your attention.

Some hula-ing at the Tiki Room/Bar whatever it was called.

Everyone doing some version of the Wakayama hand sign.

Camera fun in Shinjuku station.

The next day I went out shopping because the orientation panels became more one on one and I didn't want to get found out. In the evening we went out to Ikebukuro to check out Namja Town-- it's a food theme park. We didn't get very good pics there so I'll just explain it. You pay 300yen ($3) to get in and you can go to the different 'kingdoms' which are seasonal and buy food there. First we went to the Gyoza Stadium where they have gyoza from all over Japan and all kinds of varieties-- some with mochi and cheese or in weird shapes or different meats. We got 3 things-- a sampler set, one kind with a raw egg in the middle for dunking and one with Spanish ham and cheese. They weren't that great actually =/ We were kind of disappointed. The atmosphere was fun though.

Next stop was the Dessert Kingdom with a pudding fair going on. They had a huge refrigerator with little jars of pudding from around Japan. Some were made with special kinds of milk or flavoring or added fat and all kinds of silliness. We got 2-- one called 'hell pudding' (wasn't that good) and another made with brown sugar that was super delicious!