Yattai! (We did it!)

We arrived to a rather barmy 5C in Osaka on 12th February. The weather did not abate our excitement at starting a new life in this city. After what felt like endless weeks of partying, cleaning up Rocklea Rd, more partying and dining, and finally saying teary farewells (thank me for that!), we were definitely ready to begin a new phase in our lives.
Our new abode is in a quiet area about 5km out of central Osaka called Abeno-ku. We are surrounded by two train lines and two tram lines, convenience stores are bountiful as are vending machines selling beer, cigarettes and even batteries! So we will not starve, get thirsty or run out of energy.
The apartment is quite large, with three separate areas: lounge/TV room, bedroom with double bed and kitchen.

Bathroom and toilets are also separate. One downside is the toilet - it's a squat toilet! There's barely much room in the toilet itself, and squatting just makes it even more interesting. Really gives your knees and thighs a great workout! There is a seat you can place over the hole, but it does make it very difficult to manouevre around. Another downer is the lack of natural light. It's very dark in the apartment until about midday when the sun finally creeps in.
But aside from the darkness and the poo-hole, the rest is quite cosy.
We have spent the last three days getting to know Osaka - doing lots of shopping and going to the 24-hour supermarket. It's quite a novelty figuring out the products. Haven't had any misses here yet!
Apart from the very exciting sight of snow falling (!!), the first day was definitely the most frustrating, with lots of misses. As we were going to be here for quite awhile, we had to first get ourselves Alien Registration at a ward office (council) which our housing agent, Patrick, had pointed out when he picked us up from the train station the night we arrived. After 3 tedious trips back and forth to this ward office (2 for not bringing our new address and work details, and the required passport photos), we were finally told that we were in fact at the incorrect one. Luckily we were only 15 minutes walk from this place!
Then, the rest of that day was spent waiting for our luggage to arrive from the airport. Bad luck struck again as we missed this delivery by about half an hour, and wasted a whole night waiting.
Oh the wonders of communicating in Japan! It's definitely going to be an interesting time here.
By the way, we now look quite Japanese with our newly acquired jackets!