Change Is Afoot...

...and exciting change at that! In contrast to the dreary monotony that passes for my job at the moment, I'm going to be moving apartment in a couple of months to somewhere closer to restaurants, bars and beer vending machines. I'll be moving north to Kurashiki City, the exciting centre of, well, itself, as opposed to the inaka outskirts of Kurashiki- Kojima- where I currently live.

Unfortunately, moving apartment in Japan involves ridiculous start-up costs. First theres the "deposit", put in inverted commas as its hit-and-miss whether you'll see any of it again. This is usually 2-4 months rent. Then there's the "gratuity payment", a bizarre 1 months rent to say "thank you" for moving in, as if actually paying rent itself isn't thanks enough. In total this will be a payment of around 150,000 yen to move. My cunning plan is that if I find a place thats roughly 10,000 yen a month cheaper in rent, I'll be recouping most of the costs over the next year and 4 months. That means I can look for places around 48,000 yen a month (a low but manageable amount), and the Board of Education will pay 25,000 yen of this in subsidy (as they currently do for my 58,000/month place).

After the place is found and the huge downpayment is paid, all I'll need to do is relocate absolutely everything in my apartment a few miles north, so thats another 30,000 yen for a moving van (the BOE wants me to take everything in my current apartment, which will save me lots on furniture but also leave me with ridiculous amounts of stuff that I don't want and can't throw away. I may have to rent a "storage space" apparently)

There's a huge amount of stuff to be sorted out before I can move, and finding an apartment that meets my picky specifications (2nd floor, south facing, 2 rooms plus kitchen, air-con) will be tough. But, like Mao Tse-Dong and his really Long March, I won't rest until it's done.

In total I'll be spending about 60,000 yen or so to move, plus spending far more in Kurashiki living, and waking up an hour earlier 3 days a week. But it'll all be worth it to live in a thriving metropolis!

The search starts here...