With a new roommate coming and only a week to get the apartment in order, Azeroth and I have a lot of work to do. NOVA is supposed to send an inspector for company apartments to make sure everything is clean and in order before someone new moves in. This apparently hadn’t been done for the last few people moving into our three bedroom apartment in Ooka City Plaza. We considered the chance that nobody would come again, but decided that we didn’t want to take the risk. It was also a good excuse for us to finally clean our filthy apartment. After work we cracked a beer and looked around to assess the situation:

• Azeroth wanted to move from his current room across the hall from me to Palmer’s old room off the living room. His room was literally knee deep in beer cans and food wrappers
• The main storage closet was filled with expired vitamin supplements and liqueur
• The living room was decorated with small toys from fast food meals and those plastic bubble machines in stores
• The fridge had condiments, booze, and expired food
• There was mold under the bathtub (apparently a common problem in Japan)
• The shoe storage in the front hall was filled with shoes that did not belong to Azeroth or I
• The kitchen cupboards were filled with pint beer glasses from local izakayas
• Everything was dirty

The closet was the first item on our list. Japan’s garbage disposal rules are confusing, so we decided that the best way to get rid of the supplements and liqueur was to dump it all in the toilet. Our toilet had seen some terrible things over the years, but I don’t think it was ready to handle load after load of vitamin pills. We topped off the vitamins with a bottle of egg based liqueur (eww) that had been in the apartment for at least 3 years. I recorded the occasion for posterity with my phone as the rancid liquid glooped into the toilet. 

While we worked on the living room we returned to the poor toilet periodically to give it a flush. By the end of the evening the living room and closet looked much better, but there was still a lot of work left. We both made vague promises about buying cleaning supplies and curtailing our recreational activities until things were in order. It’s going to be a busy week!

** 2016 update – I watched the video of our cleanup again while I was rewriting this post. Seeing the state of our poor toilet made me giggle uncontrollably.