funny Japan 面白い日本

Here are the promised anecdotes I spoke of before! Yay!

First, not actually funny, but interesting (which also fits into the title of this post btw. The word 面白い omoshiroi not only means funny, but also interesting) Most people in Japan don't have separate washer/dryer machines. This means that if they have a dryer at all it is a multi-purpose thing in the same drum as your washer, and it also doesn't work so well. Almost everyone in Japan hang dries their laundry.

My neighboring building

Apartment buildings even have laundry lines/racks placed standard on balconies with convenient frequency.

To get on with my story. I had done laundry late the night before and hung out a bunch of shirts and things to dry before I left for school that morning. My building does not have those happy laundry racks, but the divider on the balcony between mine and my neighbor's area has a ridge along the top that enables hangers to sit there securely. It was kinda windy that day and when I came home my stuff had all been knocked off the hangers, or the hangers had fallen down and all my, still only partially dry, clothes were on the floor. Until I started hanging them back up and noticed that I had more hangers than clothes.

Now the shirt that I was missing wasn't worth much, in fact I'd bought it used at Goodwill for $1 but it was one of my favorites and I leaned as far over the balcony as I felt safe hoping to see it lying on the ground so I could go pick it up. It wasn't there. Nor was it there between the bushes and the big picture windows in the lobby when I went downstairs. So I gave up on finding it, thinking some homeless person had found it on the sidewalk and took it, or that it may have been picked up and thrown away. But lo and behold three days later I was coming home from school and what do I see folded up all nice and neat and reeking of fabric softener on the table in the lobby? You guessed it. Some nice person, probably the manager's wife, but not necessarily, had found my shirt and washed it, and left it out so I could find it!

On Writing and Homework

In the interest of avoiding homework, (some of which is already overdue, figures really) I've decided to return once more to Blogger and see if I have anything interesting to say. As my readers will know, both of you, the NaNo story I've been working on for going on 9 months here is nearly finished! Yay! Fanfare! I have something like 2 chapters left which include sending my banished gods back to the heavens, revealing that several humans aren't, a large battle that I'm completely unprepared for writing, a not-so-touching lover's reunion, and the general conclusion of the story. Sounds good right? I should even have some fun writing it all out when I finally get what's going on in the battle figured out. So far I know there has to be one and I have a list of things that must happen during it. Now I just have to figure out how it's all gonna go down. And type out the 20+ pages of shorthand I have in my NaNo notebook.

On a side note, last Friday was Friday the 13th! To make that a little more interesting it was Friday the 13th on a full moon. That only happens about every 80 years! There's a specific number of course, but I can't remember it, or where exactly I got this info from. I think it was weather.com, but I'm not completely sure.

Tokyo Skytree from my apartment on Friday the 13th with a full moon

And before I leave you, I'll have an interesting Japan story or two up here pretty soon, or try to anyway, I'm gonna point ya'll to my twitter, on which I say little of import, and only some if interest, but you'll hear from me more often than on Blogger. https://twitter.com