Today we woke up early to shovel all the snow out of the road. It was only about 3 inches deep by morning. My camera is broken, so I've been taking pictures with the Iphone that I'm borrowing. I'll post them to my facebook one of these days.

After that Chi went to Shinjuku to take some pictures with Natsumi to use on their resume-like application thingies. I went to the place where I lived last year to see my old roommates. Unfortunately noone was there that I knew, so I went to a nearby park to walk around. Then I decided to walk from there all the way to downtown Shinjuku. It took about an hour.

There I tried to meet back up with Chi and Natsumi. I couldn't find them. I wandered around downtown Shinjuku looking for the cafe they were in, but I never could find them, even with the help of the GPS on my Iphone. I was extremely frustrated. After about two hours they came to pick me up at the west end of Shinjuku station. We ate dinner and Natsumi finished helping Chi with her first resume-like application thing.

Finding a job in Japan is very very different from in the states. I'm not sure how it works yet. There are lots of different papers you have to make, strict rules and guidelines to follow, meetings to go to, many levels of interviews to pass, etc.

One example: If you don't have black hair, noone will hire you. Ridiculous, right? The reason is because employers here don't want their employees dying their hair. Almost all Japanese people's natural hair color is black, so if it's not black, chances are it's been dyed.

Chi dyed her hair black last night for the picture today. She dyed her hair brown last year. In December, for job hunting, she dyed her hair back to black. But a little bit of brown has started showing through recently, so she had to dye it black again.

黒　kuro - black
髪の毛　kami no ke - hair (on your head)
仕事　shigoto - job