Adventures in Grocery Shopping and life without a car

1-26-2008

So we are car less and were going to try to remain that way except that hubbs time to report is too early most of the time and he sleeps on the ship. Hopefully by the time I get to posting this I will have fixed that and gotten us a car. My boss does not care when I work and the school cares less as long as the work gets done. So I will go in early and get home earlier and at best that is three less bus fares and at worst it is 4. The bus is 240Yen each way so that for the both of us is close to $10 a day.

So I had to do some grocery shopping and decided to take a cab home. It went off without a hitch, thankfully my cab driver knew where my neighborhood is and spoke decent English. It cost me 2500Yen (about $25) but they take credit cards which is good because I had less Yen on me than I thought. It was not too bad and I can generally buy a little at a time but I needed the basic stock up supplies. The day before I carried a 20lb bag of dog food on the bus. We went looking for a car too. There are some for sale on base but they are over 10 years old and cost $2-3000. I was told where the used car district is in town so we went looking. My coworker had said it was too far to walk so we took the train and walked the rest of the way. It turned out it was halfway between the station and our house so we walked the whole way home, couldnt even catch a bus once we were headed back. We saw a lot of cars but none of them were what we really want. There is a Nissan Cube and Suzuki Wide kei-car for sale on base. I plan on calling the owners tomorrow. It looks like we will finally be getting the money owed us BUT it looks like we have not received any OHA and we are on month 2. Thankfully I can cover the rent from my job so I am getting us a vehicle, it sucks having hubbs sleep on the ship.

Last week we took the train to HOMES which is like a Home Depot/Sears/Target and bought things we need for the house and hoofed it all back on the train. We also ate at Denny's It was quite yummy. We have one near the house and I don't doubt we will visit it. I had the best BLT I had ever had and I am not normally a fan of BLTs of course I really wanted a sandwich and it was toasted and warm, it was very cold outside.

When we have a car we still won't be using it much. Just trips to places where we know we can park. Home, Base and the shopping around HOMES. I actually enjoy the train and the bus it is quite relaxing.