I’m legal!

It’s been a huge week for the Sushi on a Stick household.
First of all we got the exciting news that THE INTERNET IS COMING. After gearing myself up for another whole month of lugging my laptop to the internet café every day, the man rings up to say they’re coming around on Sunday. Thus we will be up and running less than four weeks since I put in the application. Incredible. (And it only serves to vindicate my theory that it’s always best to lower your expectations at the outset so that you can be pleasantly surprised later on.) Ruby in particular was over the moon when I told her, and I imagine she’ll be up all night  on Sunday updating her Facebook page/blog/msn/twitter etc etc.
While I was still recovering from the shock of this announcement, the visa consultant guy from Tokyo rang me  to say that the good folk at immigration down in Hiroshima City have deemed me worthy of residing in their fine country here for a whole three years. Eleni and I are going to catch the bullet train down tomorrow morning to get the relevant stamps in the passports and then we will finally be legal, which is a major relief because… well because you Just Never Know with immigration authorities do you. They love nothing more than a flimsy pretext to boot you out of the place. Come to think of it, I’d better not murder anyone or commit fraud within the next 24 hours just in case.
Having our proper visas means that;
• I can get a proper mobile phone contract in my own name at last
• Eleni can start looking for work in the school system
• We can join the health insurance system (equivalent of Medicare but includes dental cover–yay!)
• We can get child allowance benefits (bonus!)
• Plus a whole lot of other procedural thingies that I can’t quite recall right now.

So it’s all come together in one glorious week and now the adventure begins in earnest. The kids are settled at school, we’ve discovered lots of great shops and supermarkets, we’ve tracked down a soccer club, we’ve been for some lovely walks in the mountains and we’re steadily checking out the local eateries.
Meanwhile the first major local festival of the year, called Shinmei-ichi, is coming up on February 14th and I am also off to watch the sun rise from the top of a nearby mountain that morning with my new friend Mr Nishihara who I met in the yakitori bar that time (see story here).