Welcome to our new apartment! It's been a work in progress to unpack everything, buy a few new furniture pieces, get the baby's room ready, etc. But we're finally settled and ready to share pictures!
This is the entrance when you walk in the front door. The door to the left is the toilet, a shoe closet on the right, and straight down the hall is the kitchen on the left, shower room on the right, & living room straight ahead.
Toilet room. Much more fancy than our last apartment - this toilet is not only a bidet with several different wash functions, but it's also automatic... so you don't even have to push the handle to flush. The hallway light is also automatic - so it makes going to the bathroom in the middle of the night, which I tend to be doing frequently these days, quite easy!
Unfortunately we lost our walk-in shoe closet that we loved so much in our other apartment. So we've had to manage cramming all our shoes into this tiny space. But better than no shoe closet I suppose!
So if you keep walking, just a few steps after the toilet & shoe closet is the shower room/sink/laundry on the right-hand side....
Unfortunately the sink is pretty low in this apartment, and only comes up to about Joe's knee... so he has to bend over quite a bit just to wash his face. The poor guy is going to have back problems by the time we leave this country.
Walk-in shower room. It also has the heater function that we LOVE - so we hang our clothes to dry in here.
On the left hand side directly across from the shower & laundry room is our kitchen.
The kitchen is quite a bit larger than our last apartment - but unfortunately we didn't gain anything in counter space. We also lost our gas stove :( But on the plus side, we gained a dishwasher and extra oven! The dishwasher only holds about one meals worth of dishes - but it's better than no dishwasher. And the extra oven just means we can now actually cook 2 dishes at once if we need to... it's just as tiny as our other oven, so no turkey for thanksgiving again this year.
Directly in the back of the kitchen is a pantry. It's actually really big, and we love it! Even though it's not big enough to store suitcases, which has been the biggest challenge for us to find space for, it definitely holds all of our Costco items & miscellaneous things.
Just beyond the kitchen & shower/laundry room is our ginormous living room!
The living area feels about twice as big as our other apartment. It's such a great feeling to have space to move around in and not feel so crammed all the time. And the giant window lets in a lot of natural sunlight.
Another view of the living & dining room. We even had enough space to put a desk for Joe's school work in the corner.
Off of the living room are our 2 bedrooms. They are actually adjoining rooms by 2 sliding doors, which will be really nice when the baby is here.
Our bedroom - the smaller of the two.
Guest room/baby room. I'll post more detailed pics of the nursery later. :)
Lastly, here are a couple photos of our balcony & outside views...
We are still living downtown, so our view consists of city buildings & streets. We're on the 11th floor, so high enough to get a descent view, but not quite high enough to be above all of the surrounding buildings.
We adore our new building and neighborhood! Joe jokes that our building is the "Boeing Headquarters" since so many other co-workers live in the building. But besides Boeing people, there are quite a few other foreigners as well. It's a great environment, and nice to be around other English-speaking people. We have two grocery stores just down the street, an easy 5-10 minute walk... which has been super convenient! No more going to 5 different stores a week to buy everything we need since I can now get everything at ONE store!!! There's a Starbucks directly across the street, as well as the subway station. Nice to have the essential amenities only 1 minute away. In addition, there are several yummy restaurants nearby - including Nagoya's best Mexican restaurant, a local taco place, Thai, Indian, okonomiyaki, and numerous others that we haven't even tried yet. Lastly, there is a mall down the street too! We feel fortunate that we were able to move to such a more convenient location. :)
Walking around at a festival downtown.
Hanging out at Ikebana class with Penny & Sara.
My freestyle arrangement.
Lounging with her future boyfriend Ethan at Moroccan restaurant Casablanca. She slept right through the belly dancing show, but Ethan sure enjoyed it!
We also joined a mom & baby exercise class. Here is a picture of all the babies in the class. It's a pretty neat setup. The babies lay on the blanket in the center of the room, and the moms form a circle around the blanket to be near their baby. We exercise when we can, and hold/rock/bounce the baby on the giant exercise ball when they're fussy, and change & feed them as necessary. It's a very laid back and fun environment!
