Job Discussion Forums

[Sweetsee]

Have to agree with you Aspara about Saitama, not much to look at. But we managed to find an idylic slice of it near the Tokyo border and while sitting on the sofa here looking out there is nothing but sky and green, and what makes it even more surreal is there are no power lines, well okay there is one but for the most part they are absent. Too bad there aren't any hills around, makes for some boring skating.
More smoother? Hmmm...okay...so OT, whereabouts in Saitama are your mates?

[fluffyhamster]

I'm in Saitama (exact location must obviously remain classified ). I live right next to a paddy field with two small wooded hills just beyond, with old houses nestled under the trees on the slopes. No power lines either, but plenty of mosquitoes, frogs, geckoes, dusty leathery tarantula-sized spiders and, best of all, only an intermittent mobile signal (due to the hills) - a sure sign of 'inaka' if your mobile starts conking out, eh. On the other side of the apartments building, though, are dusty roads, carparks, dodgy wire fencing seperating ill-defined scraps of land, and that unique mix of Japanese housing which ranges from shantytown shack to gleaming zillion yen private property - a patch of a surburbia of sorts amidst a bigger patchwork of post-apocalyptic srubby farmland and light industrial blighted wasteland (influenced a bit here by one of the previous poster).

The thing with living out in the depths of Tsukuba (and taking the fast yet expensive Tsukuba Express) is that you're not going to have much left for beer etc once you get off in Saitama much less central Tokyo (assuming you'll be travelling back and forth a fair bit and wanting to shop, sightsee and whatnot).