Day 19 (Osaka) : Man vs Drain Pipe

First thought of the day: I think I'm developing an allergic reaction to food before noon or maybe tuna rolls for breakfast is just a bad idea.

Talk about not learning from other people's mistakes. I was just enjoying a little private time on my own toilet when I happened to notice mail sitting in the bin on my door. This might sound normal to some people, but I have a kiosk with an auto-lock entry system downstairs. Mail is never brought directly to my door. So after two weeks of living here, I JUST realized that I even had one of those door-mailbox thingies. It's strange since I've only been here two weeks but I guess it's a catch up bill to round of last month.

School was decent today. Tsuji-sensei taught in the morning and a new teacher, Masuno-sensei, taught after lunch. There were a lot of group drills and we covered ~て and ~したり grammar. I was confused at first because I thought each teacher was responsible for their own topic like kanji or grammar. Apparently, they cover all the topics in different a different order from each other. This seems like a really great idea to me because I don't have to worry if one teacher is difficult to follow, because three other teachers will cover the same topic that week. It sounds more redundant than it really is because we move through the topics so quickly it's not like we get a lot of practice or review time if we only cover it once.

The land lord sent a guy by today to fix the leak in my sink and shower, which is awesome. It almost feels like a real shower now. I realized after the guy left that I forgot to get him to locate the rancid smell in my bathroom. (Before you start snickering, baths and toilets are generally/always separated so when I say bathroom I mean the sink and laundry room.) I feel bad asking the guy to come out here so often to fix little problems so I decided to figure out the mystery myself. I had to move some stuff around, but I eventually found the drain for the washing machine which was full of black stinky liquid.

First thought in my head is, "Oh great, the drain is clogged." Not having any appropriate tools at hand I grabbed the toothbrush that I use to clean and wax my shoes to further investigate. Low and behold, the drain is about two inches deep with no apparent holes. It took about twenty minutes of fiddling around with the toothbrush before I realized it was supposed to be full of water. (Fresh water would keep the foul water at the bottom but no one had used it for a long time so...) Once I started running fresh water through the black water cleared out and it started to look good as new. It still smells like sewage though but I'm hoping that will clear out by tomorrow.

Tomorrow is my first Friday and I'm really looking forward to it. I've got a lot of side marked Japanese that I need to go back and review and I've been so busy with homework this week that I haven't had any choice but to put it on the back burner and wait. So here's to hoping that the weekend doesn't have a ton of homework. I'm also putting five bucks on there being a kanji test tomorrow.