1st communication

What`s up Peeps,
Greetings from Osaka! Hope everything is going well back home.
The flight was pretty brutal... I don`t ever want to fly a 10 hr non stop stretch again, if I can help it. Once that was over with, though, the fun began. Mellisa and I are having a blast checking out some sites and getting familiar with our neighborhood. We haven`t started looking for work yet, but there are some little-kids schools very close by, so we are planning to drop in and feel out the possibilities for a job. We just decided on an appartment on Thursday, signed a leese, and are happy with bagging a 400sqr ft. place just outside of downtown Osaka. We can pretty much walk anywhere we need to be, including the subway station (2 minutes door to door) for further destinations. We applied/registered as residents on Friday and now we need to wait a month for our resident cards before we can get a cell phone, open a bank account or get internet at home. Kinda` stranded for a month. For now I have been dropping in on an internet cafe to communicate with people and update my blog. There must be hundreds of them, but everything is Japanese and has flashing lights, so it`s pretty hard to tell a Pachinco Parlour from a grocery store (no kidding...wait for the pic.). The internet cafe we found is a subway ride away, so I have been mostly out of touch. Not that I would spend much time emailing at the moment anyway... There is so much to do and see. It is the rainy season right now so we are getting nice weather one day, and grey, rainy, blah weather the next. Today was gorgeous, and I got a sunburn while walking through the Tenoji Zoo and Botanical gardens (I know it sounds lame, but the park grounds were facinatingly well kept and there were some amazing little picturesque views of ponds, pagotta, and bonsai like pruned trees). Our highlight was feeding turtles and coy with a rice cracker that a stranger gave us (he and his wife were feeding them too).

I still haven`t picked up a camera, but I will in the next day or two, and then I can send/post some cool pics. I know I had originally planned to send emails and update my blog every Friday, but that has been a bit of a challenge with the current internet situation. Please bare with me... I will get into the routine soon.

`Till next time,


Mike