Now we can see who is visiting

Quick update

Just a quick update so you're all not kept in suspense about what's going on. We are in our house, of course, and loving it. We have one car for now and are waiting on Josh's license packet to come back so that he can drive too. Lily is enjoying her yard a lot and I'm sure she's eating plenty of tasty bugs and snails. Weird! I know. We are enjoying the beauty and differences that Okinawa has to offer when we have time, or more like when Josh has time. It is change of command season so they are keeping busy, busy, busy! We will be getting our Internet on the 15th so we won't have to use these silly phones anymore to attempt to communicate with anyone, can't wait! I'm attempting to do the housewife thing for a little bit until I go stir crazy I'm sure. Even though I'm sure moat of you are a little uneasy about the thought of us keeping a clean house, we are for the most part. There are still boxes that need to be unpacked and clutter that needs a home, but it's better than it has been before. Don't think I will try to blog on my phone again so we'll wait until we have the Internet connection. We are alive and well. No worries!

Gloomy

It’s been raining ALMOST every day since we’ve arrived on Okinawa. Today we finally bought umbrellas and signed our lease! YAY!!! So we have our housing appointment tomorrow to discuss furniture and all of that fun stuff! Also Balinda(the owner of the housing center) told me about this place called Nitori which is like Ikea, but Japanese! So neat I’ve been looking on their website and hope to go soon. We can’t/don’t want to buy much in the way of furniture but there are some musts. We also have to find a car, HAVE to! Not much else to report on, just waiting to see that sun shine!

Loving the plant life here!

Just another beautiful hibiscus I got a picture of while waiting in the rain for the housing agency =) no decision on a house yet! We viewed two more that we liked today. House #1 from yesterday is out, we decided no yard, no deal! So now we have 3 in mind and the decision just got much harder.

Another day another dollar

Today I rejected our housing offers. We decided to go with an off-base house. We actually have two houses that we are super happy with and now we have to pick one which is really hard. Now I will just elaborate on our offers

click here to visit site to view house choice #1

House 1:    3 bedrooms 1.5 bath, more traditional Japanese home, HUGE master bedroom not typically found in Japanese homes, Tatami mats taken out so there is no risk of ruin, also has a hobby/computer area room, a lot of storage space, enough room for a dining room area and a living room, plenty of space for visitors or friends, nice quiet area with neighbors on one side only, the back yard and other side of house are surrounded by vegetation. NO YARD =(

click here to visit site to view house choice #2

House 2: Ridiculously modern looking, 2 bedrooms 1 bath, You park on the roof (it’s concrete, it’s safe), has a video camera so you know who is waiting at the top to come in, beautiful dark wood floors and accents, small living/dining room area combined (possibly fit a 2 person table max), pretty small space in general,  Brand new, the owner is the architect who designed the house. Wonderful yard for Lily!

We are having  such a hard time choosing between the two of them. The pictures really don’t do either of these places justice, they are both super amazing! Any input our friends and family have we would love. If house #1 had a yard I wouldn’t think twice because there is so much room, but it doesn’t. House #2 is super awesome, great yard for Lily but not a lot of space, this is truly a house for a couple.

To House or not to House…

So today we received two offers from housing on where we will be living for the next three years. Offer one sounded amazing but would never work for us. It was a new apartment at Camp Kinser. This would be 20 min+ for Josh to travel to work, which was fine in New Bern but in Japan we will exercise a bit more caution. The other problem was…its an apartment, no yard for our Lily! And the fact that you can’t even have pets in these apartments factored in as well. Offer number two was a duplex on Foster. While it was ON Foster, this meant you had to go out the Foster gate to get back on because it is a separate housing entity. We went and visited and weren’t too thrilled with the prospects of living there. Meet our possible new home…

                        

It’s not amazing, but most of the base housing isn’t really amazing. It is older and unrenovated, but on the plus side it has a pretty big yard for Lil. From the outside you can’t tell but the ceilings are actually pretty high in all of the rooms. Its not a super bad layout, but it’s hard to not compare it to our old house that I loved so much. Tomorrow I am going to go talk to someone in housing about possibly living off base, and whether it is affordable  to our little family. We’ve found some really awesome looking places online and are really hoping they might look as amazing in person! Josh has to work tomorrow; he has a PFT and a gig that he can’t miss! Now that we are here he is, again, the only euphonium. Other than that, today we bought some cute kokeshi dolls to start our collection and I took a few more pictures! Enjoy.

Pictures from Camp Courtney (That haze in the background is the ocean, dang you overcast skies!)

Pictures from around town, nothing particular

Pictures of the plants- Hibiscus and a really bright bush, I think they have both of these in the states, but they’re more fun here =)

This one, I just found peculiar. Whenever they were doing yard work at the hotel here, they had another person holding a shield by the vehicles so that they wouldn’t get dirty. In the states they either tell you to move your car, or you get grass all over it.

                         

Another Day in Oki!

Sorry its been a while since I’ve updated you all but we’ve been busy and tired. Along with both of those we’ve also had a couple days of nothingness. Today was our newcomers brief where we got a lot of information about the island and I got my license to drive in Japan! Josh can’t get his yet, he has to send his card up to Command to be looked over and signed prior to getting it, but he did take the test and pass, so that’s good anyways! After a long day of listening we headed to Camp Courtney to try and get some of Josh’s check in done, but the people that work there that we need were, of course, not in at the time. So we drove a while out of the way for nothing…at least we got to sight see. The only bad part was we forgot the camera. SHAME SHAME, I know. We’ll get better at this hopefully. After “work” we went out with Sandra and Steve to Coco’s. Coco’s is a super popular quick serve curry restaurant here. The food was really good to say the least. After, we went and walked around another mall type thing which is rather fascinating to me. I also got a fun stamp out of a kids toy machine to put on letters, mind you I have no idea what it actually says. Only 7:51 here but I think its about bed time we did have to wake up at 6:15 this morning after all =)