Oct. 7th

So this morning Braden and I are going to search for some inexpensive bicycles. We are going to be able to save a lot of money on bus fare with bicycles, thats for sure. It seems like we've already spent quite a lot on the public transportation system, and I don't want to spend any more than is absolutely necessary. There are tons of people here who ride bikes, at the college there are hardly any parking spaces for cars, but there are large lots for parking bicycles. Even the large grocery stores have big bike parking lots. The bikes here are kinda different looking. They're big, and the seats seem low, and every single one, it seems, has a large basket in the front, and most are locked by locking the wheel to the frame of the bike so that it can't turn, as opposed to locking it to a metal bike rack. I'm slowly getting used to way things are done around here.

One thing thats hard to get used to is sorting the trash. When we first got here, we, and the other international students, got at least two long lectures about how to sort the garbage and recycling, and we've all been given the handbook called "A guide to the separation and disposal of household waste" at least three times. That book's all over the place! So, as a result, my kitchen has FOUR wastebaskets. Each of them contains a specially marked waste bag. They are labeled "burnable waste", "non-burnable waste", "paper recycling", and "plastic recycling". And that's not all! We also have to separate the plastic and aluminum bottles, copy paper and magazines, milk and juice cartons, and cardboard. If your garbage isn't correctly sorted, then the garbage men won't pick it up. Instead they'll place a big sticker on it saying you did it wrong and you have to sort it again. And they DO check it. And they are very particular about it. It's kind of hard at first to know what goes where, but the guidebook helps (it even has an index), and we can ask the landlady questions too. Even though its kind of annoying I guess its really good for the city, and Japan probably has much fewer landfills because of it.