We Live in a 14th Floor Submarine

Yes, we moved into our second Tokyo Apartment. While we believe we were able to submit a change of address form, you should now send any mail to our new apartment. It's in the same building. Instead of #1204, we are now in #1406. If you still need our full address, remember to send us a harassing email.

You have to see it to believe it. At the entrance it is quite narrow like a submarine. I guess in one respect it is Frank Lloyd Wright-ish. That is where you have a compressed entrance that opens to a larger space. The larger space is our living room. Then we have an upstairs. That's right, 37.83 square meters (or 407 square feet) with 2 floors. Our upstairs has a queen-sized bed so that we don't fall into the gap between 2 twin beds. We also have a desk area and a fairly large walk-in closet. If there is one thing that we are not missing, it is storage space here.

Here's the floor plan...
The picture on the left is the downstairs. The large space is our living room. It contains a futon couch, a coffee table, and a tv. The picture on the right is the upstairs. The large space fits our bed. You may wonder, where is the dining room? No dining room. Not that we are very formal with meals anyway. Our dining room is basically our coffee table. The more important question is, where is the kitchen? Basically it is in the hallway between our entry door and our living room. This means that we can't open both the bathroom door and the refrigerator door at the same time. It is a little tricky. Here are some pictures of stuff in our apartment...

The curtains that you see in the bedroom and living room are for the balconies. Oddly, the luxury of having 2 balconies is lost on us since it is kind of cold outside (gets up to 45 degrees on an average day). However, that does mean that we do get a lot of sunlight in the morning as we face south.

Things that are good: We still have the nifty shower room, the toilet with the heated seat, and the clothes washer/dryer. There is a space near the foot of our bed where we can put some sort of "pack and play" for our kid to sleep in. The biggest advantage that this apartment has over our old apartment is that when we have over night guests visit, we don't all have to sleep in the same room or even on the same floor. So, when you visit us, yes, you get to sleep in the living/dining/guest room on the futon couch. If there are two of you, we will set up the memory foam as a second sleeping area in the living room. We are still trying to figure out the 3 people visiting at once thing.

We have tested our hosting abilities for dinner twice. Kay and Mayumi came over for pizza. (We made Kay call Domino's.) Then Yuri and Shin-chan came over to watch American football. (We made Yuri call Domino's.) Yes, we only have our Japanese speaking friends over when we want pizza. :)

We are here until April. It's not as bright and spacious as our first apartment, but it is livable. We are learning more and more about organizing space. This is an interesting side-effect to spending time in Japan.