Somehow, it all comes back to food and the weather.

Nagoya is, statistically, the hottest city in Japan. Hotter even than regions further south, such as Okinawa - I didn't quite grasp this until I started living here. Nagoya has the sea on one side, and mountains on the other three, making it a heat-trap, and the heat's both oppressive and exhausting due to the constant humidity.

I work during the hottest hours of the day in an over-air-conditioned office building, and I commute via subway with only a five-minute walk between my house and my station, so during the week I often don't get the full blast, and I can go almost the entire day without using my aircon. Not so on my days off, however; I ventured outside but once today, and that was to go grocery shopping. My bank account dips ever lower, and no thanks to yesterday!

Though hard on the wallet, yesterday was fun: after our Japanese lesson, C and I caught the train out to my coworker Shinobu's area, and she helped us navigate our first haircuts in Japan. C, having long hair, had not found it too pressing to go before this, but since I have short hair I find it necessary to cut it every two or three months. I'm now sporting a 'do from the pages of a "short and bob" magazine - not too different from my last look, but a little longer thanks to Japanese tastes. I quite like it, but it set me back 3200 yen - and that's at 20% off for a new customer.

After that, Shinobu drove us to an Aeon-Jusco: a giant shopping complex three stories high, including movie theatre, restaurant avenue, grocery store, and two Starbucks. That's right. We had the most delicious mall food I've had in my life, and then we all bought lovely jewelled things to stick in our new hairdos, I bought some face wash from the Body Shop*, and C bought a few work shirts. After having spent over four hours there, and not even having seen half, I'm sure, Shinobu drove us to the train station and we could go home. It was quite the experience.

Life in Japan is expensive, I've found, but not for the reasons I had expected. Fruit and vegetables are expensive, true, and a/c is a necessary fact of life, but most of my expenses so far have been due to two factors: 1) I have had to start my life again from scratch, which means buying things like a mixing bowl and tupperware to keep my flour in - things I would normally have accrued from friends, family, or cheapass garage sales, and 2) commodity culture: I don't need to buy some of the things I do, when I think about it, but it's expected that I do, and every ounce of energy by the industry is put into making sure that I buy their product. And that's not counting travel.

Sometimes, I am seized by momentary doubt: what am I going to do with all of this crap when I, inevitably, go home? And then I have to start again back home! At least I'll have family to mooch from, and my small cache of goods I'm storing back home, but it gives one something to ponder.

For now, however, I'm going to try to live as simply as I can while still being able to organize. And if that means venturing out into the heat to buy a container for my rice flour, then so be it.

*A necessary purchase, I've found. The humidity makes everyone at least three times as oily as usual.