Author: david

What do you get when you cross three towns (one of which I live in?)

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That’s right! My little town of Chunan has merged with two other towns (Kotonami and Mannou) to form… Mannou. I now live and work in Mannou town. (Some of you might be wondering why, if we merged, we took the name of one of the towns. Well, it is complicated.. not really but anyways…. the old Mannou was spelt 満濃 (chinese characters) whereas the new one uses the phonetic alphabet まんのう)

 The opening ceremony was an exciting affair involving a crazy man on a loudspeaker denoucing the merger, the rope breaking on the unveiling ceremony, and the sheet covering the new town logo tearing after the rope had been fixed.

I am now working in the Mannou town office which is a 15 minute drive from my home. I absolutely love Chunan. It is a fantastic place to live and everyone at my office was very nice. That being said, I am also looking forward to working in Mannou. They treat me the same as the other employees complete with name badge, official swearing-in ceremonies, and a new computer. Yeah for me!

At any rate, Kiko and I are still recovering from our jetlag ordeal. We will have a ton of pictures (and dear I say it…? a new website???) soon!

Love, David and Kiko.

Mannou Town, March 20th, 2006 

Is that too angry? Am I allowed to say United Airlines is crap? Should I? Well maybe it is the sleep deprevation and the fact that I am going to work in 5 minutes having just stepped in my house but I will give it a shot anyways.

Wanna hear all the bad things that happened to us? Here is the list from worst to best. (And the one good thing I will give them is that there food is pretty good. Way way way better than Northwest and significantly better than Air Canada.)

My reasons why United Airlines service was bad:

     1. They left 4 out of our 5 big suitcases in Chicago.

That’s right. My phone charger, computer chargers, baby clothes, wipes, diapers, EVERYTHING. Despite the priority in our bag, apparently stuff was opened by customs in Chicago (not their fault … I guess) and it missed the flight. Why am I angry at UA? Because our stuff won’t get here until Saturday or Sunday. THAT’S 5 DAYS. If our stuff missed the flight, and its important stuff that we need to live on and keep the baby happy, shouldn’t they be rushing this a little more? We are never flying through America (and thus never using UA) again.

     2. The two things that did get through, our bag and stroller, were broken.

Nice. They all had fragile and priority on them but they still managed to break the stroller which we expected to ferry Noa around. Now Noa’s car seat cannot fit on top because the bar is broken in half, and his little eyes have to avoid the jagged plastic from the spot they broke. (It was fine in Chicago, got broken between Chicago and Osaka.)

     3. We paid just as much for Noa, who on the way there and back, got to lay in a gym bag on our knees.

We paid for an infant seat (which cost as much as our discount seats) and asked for the "baby bassinet." I am not joking when I say that we had no room between our knees and the seat in front of us. All of a sudden the angry flight attendant gives us a hard plasticy gym bag and says to put Noa into it and place it by our feet. It was physically impossible and I didn’t want to put him in the gym bag. A very nice man changed his seat (and the two empty ones beside him, please note that both he and the TWO EMPTY SEATS were located RIGHT BY THE PARTITION WHERE BABY’S USUALLY END UP SITTING), so luckily we were ok going to Canada. The way back was ok, but we still got the gym bag treatment despite paying the same amount for our tickets for someone who weighed less than my carry on. Funnily enough we sat in front of the nice man on the way back… coincidence.  

Arg… I could write more, or less, but I have to go to work now. Hopefully our luggage will arive saefely. I will let you know in a friggin WEEK. 

Love David