Moving Day

A picture says a thousand words, doesn’t it?

Having gone through many, many winters in Calgary I can say this is not a lot of snow, at least not for Calgary. I also went through several winters in Vancouver (back in the 80’s) where the city came to a stand still every time the flakes flew and that happened at least once every season. Thankfully that was not the case here in Yokohama, where we ended up moving on the morning of the worst snowstorm in at least 20 years! Stop laughing! Even though the pictures don’t do the “storm” (tongue in cheek) justice, it really was not a big deal at all although when I first looked outside I was like, really? Today?

So the move itself went well, and for the first time in 10 moves over the last decade, we crammed everything into one van and only made one trip, nice! You can see the mishmash of suitcases, bags, ironing board and cherry blossom tree (+4 wardrobe bags) that we needed to transport and needless to say, many elevator trips were made in the old building. Everything would have fit in the service elevator in the new place, but we ended up making two trips on that end.

This was only part of the total move and I expected delays with the 4 deliveries I had scheduled, but they all went off without a hitch! That included Internet and cable setup which also went seamlessly. This is unheard of in the Middle East so I was definitely counting my blessings.

We sent a small shipment from Qatar and when it arrived after 3½ months in transit the cardboard was very fragrant so we made quick work of emptying the boxes and getting them out of here which leads me to our garbage room, definitely worth a mention. It is absolutely spotless and they recycle almost everything here, awesome! What a joy!

We have 3 big bins for household waste and plastics. There’s an area for cardboard & paper, batteries, different plastic, glass & cans. It must be cleared out at least twice per day as the room and bins are empty every time I go in there! I presume the set up is the same on each level but cannot verify as our swipe card only allows us to access our floor.

Oh, and for those who don’t recycle (you know who you are) you would be politely reminded until you conform! If I could read Japanese I could tell you it’s in the by-laws!

We are on the 4th floor which is close enough to the ground to see everything clearly and on this day we could see people using squeegees, shovels and brooms to clear ramps, driveways, sidewalks and other public areas of the heavy slush that was accumulating.

These pictures are from our balcony, one on moving day and one the next day!

… and our last name isn’t even Murphy!

Bye for now.