Our Apartment

We've got our place a bit more organized and tidy; it's still probably not finished, but it's enough for some pictures! First, though, I think it's worth talking about how we got here.

So last time we were in Hakodate, we stayed in several long-term airbnbs. "Long-term" here means "about a month;" some were a little longer, some a little shorter, but generally speaking it was enough time to get comfortable in each location - but the transitions were still a little annoying, so when we were headed back, I was looking for places we could stay the whole three months of our visas.

Well! It turns out that January-March is not peak tourist season in Hakodate like July-September is; not only was there nowhere with three months straight of availability, there wasn't even anywhere (reasonable) with one month straight. Every place we were looking at was either thousands of dollars, a hole in the wall miles away from anywhere worth being, or else had enough 2-3 day bookings to stop us from doing anything for more than a week or two at a time.

We prayed about it and felt God reminding us that it's okay to ask for help, so we let our friends in Hakodate know we were struggling to find a place, and asked them what options they knew about that we wouldn't. (It did make sense, after all; we were only really aware of places marketing to foreigners.) They immediately gave us several great options to investigate, so we were like, great! One of these will work!

Then before we'd even sent our first application in, our friend Florence was like, "Hey, I found you a place." She had, we later learned, gone on something of a journey, hunting down some old contact she'd gotten years ago, reached out to him in-person, then gone to his apartment building and checked out the apartment all on her own initiative! And it is wonderful. It's a really great location, it's a really great price, and the landlord is super cool - we're already planning a barbecue together sometime soon!

It is a little smaller than most people might like, but Cassie and I have lived in many many cramped places before; this is really pretty comparable to the studio apartment we had in Los Angeles for like seven years.

Okay, enough with that! On to the pictures!