Last day of quarantine! We are so excited to get out of here!

Here's some pics of what we've been doing to stay entertained during quarantine and the view from our hotel room:

As you can see, we've all had a lot of screen time, hehe. Taran made those little drawings on paper coasters that came in the room, and we also had some origami paper that we got in our bag of instructions when we arrived. I also had my embroidery and my e-reader, both of which have helped to pass the time. The view of the city from our window has been nice to have. A couple times the kids saw window washers cleaning the building next to us and they thought that was pretty cool. 

Tonight for Halloween we're going to eat some little ice cream cups and pocky (chocolate covered cookie sticks) and watch Halloween movies. And then tomorrow, we're off to Naha! We meet in the hotel lobby at 8:30am with about five other JETs who are also headed to Okinawa, and then a shuttle will take us to the airport. Our flight is ANA471, leaving Haneda airport at 11:15am and arriving in Naha at 2:15, so about a three hour flight.

Clara says that the first thing she wants to eat when she gets out of here is McDonalds, haha. I told her that the airport might not have a McDonalds, but we'll be sure to get her something tasty. 

I'll be sure to put some photos of our new apartment in my next post!

 Welcome back to the blog everyone!

It's been a while since I last wrote an entry here. We moved from Nagoya, Japan to Federal Way, Washington in the summer of 2017 and now, fall of 2021, we're back in Japan! Braden applied for the JET program again, the same program he was in while working in Nagoya, and once again he was accepted! This time, he has been assigned to work in Urasoe City Hall in Okinawa, Japan. 

It's been a wild ride getting here. We're currently in our 11th day of our 14 day quarantine at a hotel in Shinjuku, Tokyo. We flew to Tokyo on the 16th (arrived on the 17th) and after a long and grueling walk through the airport presenting our negative covid tests, getting another covid test, and navigating various checkpoints (I have since dubbed this journey 'the trek through the nine circles of bureaucratic hell'), we finally made it to Immigration. The kids were real troopers, but we were all very tired by the time we got there. Thankfully, since we had kids with us, we were permitted to skip the regular line and use the Priority line (thank goodness for small favors). After getting through immigration, then getting our bags and getting through customs, we were ushered onto a shuttle to the hotel. The Japanese Consulate in Seattle, the Nippon Travel Agency, and representatives from JET and CLAIR (Council of Local Authorities for International Relations) were all extremely helpful when it came to helping us get the right paperwork ready and arranging everything, it all would've been much more difficult without them.

Life in quarantine is pretty boring, but we've got a schedule figured out and we haven't gone crazy yet. The kids do school work in the morning, we exercise, call family, watch music videos, and then in the afternoon/evenings we play video games or watch TV. Braden has been doing online orientations and classes in the morning while I help the kids with their school work, and it helps the time go by.

The room we've got is nice, and very spacious (by Japanese standards). Probably the most unpleasant thing we've had to put up with is the food...

We aren't getting hotel room service. Instead, CLAIR has arranged for meals to be brought to all the JETS three times a day. The meals are typical convenience store style bentos. They aren't completely awful, and honestly I think that Japanese convenience store food is better than your average American convenience store meal, but the meals they bring us are cold, and there is not a microwave in the room to heat the food up. So yeah, stuff like cold fish and rice with cold cooked vegetables gets REALLY old after a couple days. There is a small store in an upstairs lounge that was set up especially for the JETS in quarantine and we can buy small pastries and instant ramen there to supplement the meals they bring us, but the kids complain a lot about being hungry (unlike us adults, they haven't quite honed the skill of eating something when you're hungry even if it's not that tasty). Good thing they like instant ramen.

But it's only for a few more days! On Monday we'll be boarding another plane, this one bound for Naha, Okinawa. We already have an apartment picked out and should be able to move in that day. The good people working at the Urasoe City Hall have arranged to take us to the Real Estate Agent's office as soon as we get off the plane to sign the necessary paperwork. We're very excited and can't wait to show you all pictures of our new home!

Here's some pics of the kids eating so you don't feel TOO sorry for them. But we're all very excited to get out of here and eat fresh food again. 

Check back in next week for my next installment. Goodnight!