Life in Japan

February Life

10 March 2017

Since I did a roundup in January, I quite liked the idea and wanted to do it every month. Sort of like a monthly summary series :)

I totally meant to write this post earlier, but I was kept away by happenings in #MarchLife, which you’ll probably read about sometime in June lol.

First up is what we did a lot of this month:

TRAVEL

Chichibu – We went see icicles!

Read the full post here.

India – Then Fu jetted off to India for a week.

Tohoku road trip – When he came back, we drove to Miyagi and Yamagata! All in a single day!

More than 10 hours of driving that day, but sceneries like these make it all worth it!

Miyagi – Fox Village

The feeding station, the only place where people can feed the foxes

Yamagata – Came here to see the famous Zao snow monsters

Which should have looked like this:

But this was the weather we had instead:

FML why does the fog/mist/cloud/wind love us so much?!! It was the same when we went N Seoul Tower too!! Oh well, an excuse to come back another time, I suppose?

So yeah, quite a bit of traveling in February and I’m quite happy about it! The bank account not so much haha. And Fu can’t stop his repetitive chanting on how we should buy a self-driving car. He kept on Tesla, Tesla, Tesla-ing during the drives -_-

Oh, I also broke the halfway mark of the goal of visiting all 47 prefectures in Japan! 23 more to go now :D :D

HEALTH

Weird gum bump

I’ve been correcting my teeth via Invisalign for 21 months now.

I was on set 9/60 (I already finished 45 sets previously) when I realized there was a bump in my upper gum. I didn’t think much of it, but mentioned it to my dentist when I went for a regular checkup.

Gross photo ahead. But I made it slightly blur so it dilutes the gross factor.

Kidding. It’s because my phone is horrendous at macro shots. I’d show you in 4K detail if I could LOL.

TURNS OUT IT’S THE ROOT OF MY TOOTH STICKING OUT OF MY GUM.

FML.

My dentist said it was ”unexpected” because this tooth wasn’t even being moved at the moment. I was like, “Uh, will the root move back?” He said no.

“What’s the worst that will happen?”, I asked with trepidation.

“In the worst case, nerve death.”

I can only hope it doesn’t worsen ><

For now, everything is on hold as he made a new plan to correct the teeth. So the 51 sets of aligners that have been made are all going to the trash, with new ones being made as I type.

Whitening

In happier teeth news, I jumped on the chance that all the attachments on my teeth are out to do whitening! This is called making the best out of a shitty situation. Am I optimistic or what? :D:D

I wear my aligners for at least 20 hours a day, and at the start, I avoided drinking flavored drinks because it will leave gunk on the plastic. I thought green tea was fine since it didn’t have sugar. Sure, it didn’t leave a residue but it FREAKIN’ STAINED MY TEETH YELLOW. It was hideous.

And I couldn’t whiten them because I had plenty of attachments on my teeth. Now I can since the current plan scrapped = all attachments out!

Home whitening set for 1 month

HOME

This latest experience tops the list of most traumatizing events ever since my inception as a housewifu.

Question: Have you ever cleaned your rice cooker?

Me neither.

But one day when I set the rice to cook, it beeped with an error.

I opened it to check…

and the horrors were unleashed.

I CANNOT UNSEE IT.

LIKE. SERIOUSLY. WHAT IN THE WHAT IS THAT.

I was half screaming and half crying. I wrapped my hand in a two plastic bags and tried to remove it. It was practically glued on to the metal. I literally had to dig in with my nails to scrape it off.

It really felt like death warmed over.

And good lord, have we been eating rice that was in such close proximity to that??? No wonder I sometimes found brown flecks in the rice (which I would pick out to throw, most of the time. lol). I simply thought the brand of rice was lousy.

So now you know, children. CLEAN YOUR RICE COOKERS.

— —

Ugh, I can’t end this post on such a disgusting note.

So here’s a cute picture of Milk Tea looking smug with her bag of cookies:

And all in the world is right again :)

Outdoor / Nature

The Icicles of Chichibu, Saitama

The past weekend, Fu and I made a trip to see icicles! The Japanese name for icicles is tsurara, which sounds so cute, hehe. We missed it last year, but this year we quickly went to buy snow tyres and went on a one-day…

16 February 2017
Tourist guide Transport

Renting a Car in Japan

Are you planning on renting a car in Japan to do a road trip? Then this post will be a handy guide! Before we bought a car, we used to rent cars to go on road trips (here’s our first road trip, and one…

14 February 2017
Attractions

Visiting the Abandoned Island of Gunkanjima

Starting this month, I’m determined to chip away at my huge backlog of posts, so even though I visited this place last February, here it is, at last! About Gunkanjima Gunkanjima 軍艦島 is an island in Nagasaki and goes by many names. The official name is…

10 February 2017
Attractions

10 Ideas for Valentine’s Day in Tokyo

It’s less than a week to Valentines’ Day! Do you celebrate it? I think either way any excuse is a good excuse to spend the day with your loved ones! Here are 10 ideas to spend Valentines’ Day in Tokyo: 1. Tour Tokyo on water The…

8 February 2017
Everyday Adventures Gadget

How To Remove Fuzz Balls Effortlessly!

Don’t you have at least an article of clothing or two with those dreaded little balls clinging on and being an eyesore? The sweater Milk Tea is wearing has lots of fuzz balls (also known as lint balls or piling) on it and it’s…

2 February 2017
Personal

Rounding off January

No idea how it happened, but my calendar is telling me that one twelfth of 2017 is over. The heck… where did time go??! It feels like I didn’t even do anything in January! From memory, the only thing I did was go to…

1 February 2017