We Have Internet!!!!!

Meet Brother Yamada.  Because of him, we finally, finally have Internet in our apartment.  Wahoo!  Hallelujah!  We are so grateful!

Most of my posts have been about wonderful Japanese people and customs.  We can take a lesson from them in so many ways, but (you knew a "but" was coming!) in some things, they are WAY behind.  One of them is Internet.  Oh my.  We started before we even got to Japan, trying to get Internet in our apartment.  We hoped it would be in when we got here.  Now, two and a half months later, we finally got it today.  I won't bore you with all of the details.  If I did, you would probably never read another post on here again because it would be so long and boring.  But I will give you the shortened version:

We tried two different companies, both of them (after a long, drawn-out process) telling us no, we can't have Internet because we weren't going to be here for two years and because we were foreigners (basically).  We about gave up then, but this kind, dear man who is a counselor in the mission presidency in Sendai went to bat for us and signed the contract (the ever-changing contract) and put the bill in his name.  So we finally got it ordered.

So, on the very worst possible day- right in the middle of a blizzard in January- two guys showed up and hooked our apartment up with a cable from a pole across the street. 

It's hard to see, but there's a guy up on that pole in a raging blizzard, underneath a piece of visqueen, hooking up the Internet.

                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Then we waited and waited and waited.  Then we got a notice telling us that we needed to respond immediately or the deal was off.  We had Brother Yamada call and got it going again.  They finally came and did the inside the apartment work on Monday.  We were thrilled.  But they don't just do it and set it up.  We had to go buy a router ($200) and then have spent two days trying to get it to work.  We had a couple of Japanese friends read the instructions and come and try to help us, but they couldn't do it either.  So we had to hire another guy(another $75) to come and actually get it going. 

Dear, dear Americans, be grateful for your Internet.  It's a blessing you probably haven't even been counting! 

So there's the saga!  Remember, that was the short version!!