21 June, 2010

A fridge?

One of the stressful things that happens during transition are unexpected things that need decisions made about them, and sometimes quickly. Our current stressful event arrived in an email about our house in Tokyo. They are able to organise for us to move into it only 36 hours after we land. Which is good news.

At least mostly good news. The main difficulty is that, amongst all our stuff in storage we don't have a fridge. Our old fridge was dying, so we threw it away before we came back last year. Sensible move, you would think. However, moving into a house without a fridge in mid-summer is fraught with difficulties. As it stands, we don't know that we'll be able to select one and get it delivered in time. This morning's email from our Tokyo-based supervisor suggested we could look at fridges on the website of a large Japanese electrical goods shop and make a suggestion or two and maybe he could get it organised prior to our arrival.

Sounds reasonable. Until you have a look at the website. Go on, have a look here. It seems that Japanese fridges have gone the way of multi-drawers. I've never used a multi-drawer fridge. The numbers relating to drawer capacity don't mean a lot to me. The website doesn't let me look inside the fridge either. Do I feel comfortable about making a remote decision about something as important as a fridge? Not really.

Then I had a great idea - we could look up the same fridges on an English website. Unfortunately the fridges the same company sells here are different to the ones they sell in Japan. But this website at least gave us a more comprehensible explanation and view of the inside.

My other idea is to go to a large electrical goods shop here in Australia and actually open one of these fridges, so I can get a better idea of what we're talking about. Haven't actioned that one yet, but in the next two days (before school holidays begin), I think we will.

We also need to find a washing machine, but I think that that can wait until we're on the ground. After all there are Laundromats.

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