Bon Voyage, Utah and Home-finding Trip

I'm pretty sure we're leaving this Saturday, June 7th but we still don't have visas in-hand yet so you never know....but our tickets have been bought!

May 12-15th I headed down to Vegas with two of my besties and we hit the town hard...well, not too hard. I'm getting old ;)

This pic encapsulates our awesome adventure. This one was taken at Coyote Ugly where Brittney got up onstage and danced her patootie off!

After all that fun it was time for Archie and me to head off to Japan for our home-finding trip. It was fast and furious and stressful and fun.

Hiroshima is really an amazing city and I only saw a little bit of it. Jet lag was pretty tough. I woke up at 4 am almost every morning. So it made for some long days. 

Japan is 15 hours ahead of Utah so that made for some interestingly timed phone conversations with my mom, who was watching Gabe for that week! The flight was really long and it never was night. We kept up with the sun the whole time. That was so fascinating. The International Dateline is in the Pacific Ocean and it heads east. So Japan is a lot further ahead than say England even though the flight time is comparable! Just crazy. And we lost a day. So we left Sunday in Utah and arrived Monday night in Japan.

Tuesday was our home-finding trip with Paul, a Japanese-Canadian! He was fantastic work with. He told us everything he could think of on Japanese culture and getting around Hiroshima! We ate Japanese ramen and it was the most delicious ramen ever. I should have taken a pic but I was too jet-lagged to think straight and I know I'll have more opportunities in the future. It also rained all day, so Paul even bought us each an umbrella so we could stay dry.

Wednesday was a trip to Gabe's school to meet the principal and take a tour of the school. We're excited! I think Gabe will really enjoy it. Then it was off to pick our apartment after we had narrowed our search to 2 apartments. We chose the one with two stories. It was the biggest apartment Paul had shown and it's close to Archie's boss and his family that are also from Utah working for Micron out in Japan like us. The subway is two seconds away as well. So it just worked out nicely for us.

Here are a few photos of our new place! We have some lighter furniture to help brighten the darker floors and cabinets. It should be nice. A little cozy but comfy.

Here are a couple of photos of Gabe's school.

The wheel has a bunch of different areas where the kids talk about how they fit in or didn't fit in each day or week. Some are risk-taker, caring, reflective. The older kids help out the younger ones with planting and gardening!

This post is getting a bit long so I'll add another post on the rest of our home-finding trip soon.