Well, shit. That was fun. Lemme bring you up to speed here.

I woke up yesterday to find there was no hot water. Additionally, the stove didn't work. Ding ding ding, you guessed it, they shut off the gas. With a sinking feeling I sent a message to Ty and started rummaging through the junk mail pile and located the three bills that were mentioned on the piece of paper stuck in our door informing us officially of this outage.
Seeing as I like showering, and cooking, I took the three bills with me when I met Bryan yesterday in Shin Matsudo and paid them at 7-11 (all people pay their bills here, including rent, at convenience stores. Fantastic. Actually convenient.). The total was 24,199 yen. Yeehaw.
Well, I crossed my fingers that would remedy our problem, but as the hours passed I realized that Japan, much like America, didn't work on an automated, easy-going utility system.

So, now, this morning, I just got off the phone with the gas company, which was an adventure all its own. See, when you call someone in Japan, the first thing one usually says is, "誰か英語ができますか？” Unfortunately for me, the answer was “今、ちょっといない．．." "Does anyone speak English?" "Umm...not so much." So I got to put my Japanese to the real litmuss test and waded through an entire technical conversation. Apparently even though I paid the bill, they have to sent someone out to turn the gas on, which will come at the cost of 3000 yen. I told them I'd be at home between 1 and 3pm today, and all in all I think I understood the majority of the convo, without actually understanding most of the explanation in the middle.

Now that I've been in more than a few survival situations here in Japan, I'm starting to realize the value in those lessons I took. I also see the value in the lessons on similar subjects I teach at Nova. That would be a nearly impossible thing to do for an non-Japanese speaking person. Which also means that there's no way Dave would have done it on his own, with Ty in the hospital. So I was the only person who was going to pay or remedy this bill, basically. Well, at least I don't owe rent this month, after paying the entirety of it fixing the gas from the three months prior to my moving here. Yeehaw.