393 sq ft of pure functionality. This is the reverse of our floorplan. I think our bedroom at home is bigger than this entire apartment! We talked to someone last night who said their neighbors are a family of 4 living in this size. Kind of makes me reevaluate our lifestyle...














In the mornings there is an English-speaking concierge in the lobby of our building to help with questions or bookings or whatever. It turns out you can't just rent a furnished apartment here--if you want furniture you have to have what's called a serviced residence. This means somebody will come to clean once a week whether you want it or not. Probably a good thing as there's no place to store a broom, much less a vacuum cleaner.

The kitchen pictured was at another place we looked at--even more costly than the one we are in but similar. Except we have 2 burners on our cooktop. No oven, of course no dishwasher, and yes that is the clothes-washer/dryer under the burner. What you see there is the entire kitchen (fridge is to the right) and actually we are fortunate that we do have a little more counter space than this one.

The red X on the map is our location. The green blob on the right is the Emperor's Palace, it takes maybe 8 minutes to walk there and yesterday I was ecstatic to discover that there is a 5k walking/jogging trail that goes all the way around on the outside of the moat. I had been wanting to go for a run but was afraid of colliding with the seamlessly flowing pedestrians who can't know there's a great lumbering gaijin woman about to bowl them over. Not to mention that the traffic lights are so long that your legs can go to sleep just waiting for the signal to change.