Sweet Home Sasebo

The Guittars have officially landed at our new home for the next year. We are in a 2/1 apartment in downtown Sasebo within a one minute walk of infinite shops and restaurants (really infinite). There is a 1 km long arcade of shops less than one block from our front door. I do want to say before any of you get excited that the trip to get here is LOOOOOOOOOOOOONG! From our last post in Osaka we took a 2 1/2 hour train ride to Fukuoka on a Nozomi Shinkansen (aka bullet train) which is pictured above. We then transferred to another local train for a 1 1/2 hr train ride on our final leg of the voyage. Now back to the apartment. It is on the fourth floor directly above some shops and restaurants. It is a semi-Western style apartment in other words it has characteristics of both Japanese and US accomodations. When you walk in there is a small foyer area where you take your shoes off and change into the "inside" slippers. Then you step onto the wooden flooring that continues throughout the place except for the tatami room which is lined with 6 tatami mats (like rice mats).
When we arrived here we were met by a NOVA teacher who showed us around the area and introduced us to a little Mexican stand which we have visited twice already. It is operated by a Japanese man who lived in Australia for a few years and is pretty fluent in English. The nice man feeds us chicken burritos that are TDF, YUM! After eating dinner we went grocery shopping in an 8 story multi-department store called "Jusco". They have everything we would need except chocolate soy milk, Ovaltine or Nutella (sg). They did have some curry flavor cup of noodles for Nick. We also picked up other household necessities. The cleaning products we picked out by the pictures on the labels since we cannot read ANYTHING on the labels for any of the items we bought. The only reason we recognized milk was the shape of the carton. We do not know what animal it came from so we held off on it until we learn the symbols.
As for the rest of the weekend we will just continue to rest up and prepare for a busy week of training. On Monday we will have to take a train to Fukuoka for training (1 hr 40 min) and for the rest of the week we will be in Nagasaki where we will stay in a hotel. We are still waiting to set up our internet and phone. In the meantime, we are using a place called "JJ Club" where we can use the internet and play games fairly cheap.