New "used" oven

I've got my apartment basically all set up now. I've been thinking of getting a microwave, but wasn't sure if I should spend the extra money on one with an oven, since people don't have ovens below their stoves over here. But then last night, I found an oven that someone had put out in the garbage. It looks about 20 years old, but the inside is almost new. It's amazing what people will throw out here. I tried it out and it worked fine, so I'm thinking of just getting a small used microwave now since I know I wouldn't use it much.

Actually, Ayako was much more excited about the oven than I was since she always loves baking. She actually made me a lemon meringue pie last Saturday for my 6-month anniversary in Japan. It was very good, especially since it was not only her first time making it, but she has never tasted it before either. She loves baking but her kitchen is too small to bake properly, so she said she will be visiting more often now to use my oven.^^

Smoking sign

Here's a funny smoking sign that I don't think I would ever see back home. I found it outside a smoke shop downtown.

class party

I had a small party with one of my company classes last night at my place.
We had dumplings from a town which is known for its famous dumplings and had other good food as well.
We then played some games of 9 ball (even though we had 10 balls) on my new mini pool table:


And a shot after an amazing winning shot:

ACT Tower

On Sunday, I went with Ayako up ACT Tower in my city. It's by far the tallest building in my city and I can see it from whatever direction I'm driving into the city. Actually, it's only a 5 minute walk from my apartment as you can see from this next photo:
And it's very grand when you are walking around downtown:

I found out that it has 47 floors and is 213 metres tall. It's the only building in my city that is over 90 metres, so it makes a great landmark for finding my way home if I'm lost anywhere in the city.

There is an observation floor on the 43rd floor that we went to and got these nice shots:

The next shot is of my apartment from the tower:
You should be able to find it easily now when I take a shot looking south to the Pacific Ocean:
The next shot is looking north, so you can see the mountains to the north. This was one of my panoramic shots.

I could see Mount Fuji, but not as clearly as I did in a previous post:

We got to watch a beautiful sunset:
I also got a couple of good shots at night:

playing with the new camera

These are just a coupe of shots I took while trying to figure out all the functions on my new camera. The first is a picture of a tangerine cake that Ayako and I cooked in a rice cooker. It turned out well and the nice thing was that the rice cooker knew when the cake was ready, as opposed to a oven, which never does.
The next shot is of my apartment at night that I took with the stitching function on my camera that can automatically stitch 5 photos together at the correct place so that I can see a panoramic shot.