Day One – The 24 Hour Day + Extra:  My first seemingly insurmountable challenge

[DISCLAIMER:  The title lies.  This is from a couple nights ago (I didn't have internet), and I actually really only talk about one thing here.  I swear once I get more free time I'll dedicate a decent portion of it to churning out some blog posts--with pictures.  Until then, enjoy tales of my discomfort: =D]

As I type this it is 1 p.m. in the U.S. and 4 a.m. here.  Right now I’m in MS Word because I don’t know how to get the internet to work.  For this entry, I will repeat  the past day’s events in the order opposite which they happened, following this brief outburst:

AAAHHHHH!  I’M IN JAPAN!

Almost two hours ago I woke up to find that my apartment was freezing.  This shouldn’t have come as too much of a surprise. A few hours before that my new Japanese friends Youta and Machiko had kindly showed me how to use most of the Japanese appliances in my apartment (more on this in general in a little bit).  One of those was the heater/air conditioner, which operates via a remote whose buttons are labeled almost solely in kanji.  I don’t understand much Japanese speech and even less kanji, so after they left the only thing I firmly understood was how to adjust the temperature on the heat that was already blasting into my apartment.  The problem occurred because the other thing I understood was the power button, but I thought it was the power button to the remote only, not to the unit itself.  I was mistaken.  I hit the button and my heat went off.  I tried to restore it myself, but I was only met with icy blasts of AC no matter what button I pressed.  Rationalizing that my apartment was warm enough and that it would probably stay roughly that temperature as long as I didn’t open the door, I turned the unit off and proceeded to go to bed.  Two problems occurred to thwart this idea.  First, I did open the door, and second, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t a good idea to begin with.

When I woke up roughly three hours later, I wasn’t very happy, and I wasn’t optimistic about my chances with the remote.  I reread all of the things that weren’t in kanji, hoping I might find a button that said ‘hot’ or ‘this button will make your dreams come true,’ but the only buttons not in kanji said time, reset, and good night.  Desperate, I tried to read the kanji again looking for anything I might recognize.  I picked up the kanji for ‘enter,’ the kanji for the ‘shin’ in shinsetsu, which means ‘kind,’ as well as the word ‘unten,’ which I learned means ‘driving’ as in ‘driving a car.’  How incredibly useful.  Maybe I can get a parked car to drive into my apartment if I press it enough times.

I wasn’t able to look up the kanji on the internet, and my apartment wasn’t getting any warmer, so I again resorted to random button pressing.  At one point I got it to at least stop blasting cold air at me, so I stopped pressing buttons and pondered.  There were three buttons on each side, one near the bottom and two near the top, in addition to the power button.  All three on the left had proved useless in any capacity, and the button near the bottom similarly so.  One of the buttons near the top, the one that said ‘good night,’ also fell into this category, and the other top button had not been kind to me prior to this, so I was avoiding it accordingly.  Of the three remaining buttons, one had tried to freeze me, one I had found out through trial and error controlled the oscillation function, and the last, the middle button, seemed to switch modes, but had not yet yielded the hot air I was looking for.  I looked up at the unit, and back down at the remote and pressed it again.  Ta dah!  Hot air.

Idiot that I can sometimes be, I actually tried to turn off the remote again and subsequently removed my heat.  After going through a similar, but shorter process to get the heat back on, I came to recognize the character that displays on the remote screen when my heater is actually making me happy, and I’m confident I now have the knowledge and skills necessary to heat my apartment.  However, at the risk of running out of batteries, I think my remote is going to have to be on display mode all the time.

To prevent this entry from getting super long, I’ll put my first impressions of Japan and of my apartment (aside from this incident =P) in another blog entry.  Thanks for reading.