Gettin Settled

We've had a busy weekend. We moved into our place on Friday and it is really nice! We won't have internet there until next Monday, so we have to come into the lab to use it. It is a 12 minute walk from the apartment to Kris' office.
Here are a few pictures of it.
On Saturday Jamie took us car shopping. After two stops, we were very disheartened by the high prices of cars we found. In Japan, you insure the car, not the people driving the cars. This is called "Chakan" and every two years the car needs to get inspected. This costs about $300 for a Kei-car and about $800 for a larger car. Kei-cars are under 1000 cc and are very popular here. The taxes are also lower on Kei-cars. But, as they say, the third time was a charm. We bought a 660 cc Kei-car for 30000 yen without test driving it! Apparently, it is not ok to test drive cars here...you can sit in them and turn them on, but you just trust the person you are buying from. If there are problems with the car after you buy it, you can bring it back and they will fix everything. We will get our blue Subaru Pleo on Friday or Saturday after they change the timing belt and oil and replace the battery (which is as big as a motorcycle battery).
Once we have the car we can go back to the two-story fishing store that we checked out on Sunday. They have everything you can imagine there and most of the gear is affordable too! So, finally Nate can begin his fishing here on Okinawa. The fishing store is near the "American Village" which is just outside the big military base here. We saw a lot of Americans for the first time on the island. Here are a couple of other random pictures: Nate petting the horses outside the guesthouse (probably part of the agriculture program); some cool flowers; and Jamie, Micah, and Nate eating ice cream cones from the vending machine!