Activities of Saturday, October 4, 2014

Outfitting the apartment

As I've said before, we could bring so few household items with us that we need everything. I suppose we could just adjust, do without, or compromise in terms of what we need to make the apartment comfortable, but there are some things we want to have or are used to having.

 

We started at Best Denki (sort of a Best Buy type store) and bought an HDMI cable. We need an HDMI cable to stream from the laptop to the TV so I can watch my football games and an occasional show on ABC live from the US. We had one provided at the Fraser, but not at the new apartment. 

Following that huge purchase, we had another big trip to Ace Hardware. As always, we got a lot of help at Ace. We have been adopted by the very helpful clerk at Ace from last weekend. Her name is Catherine. When she saw us she started helping us again. I don't think they get any commission. She is just helpful. With the larger items she carried them to the cashier area and returned to help us find more items. The list was long and included a lot of cleaning supplies, a plastic 3-drawer cabinet, ironing board, shredder, clothes drying rack. We ended up having 2 trolleys (carts) and naturally they don’t like you to push your own. They like to push it for you. Then the very helpful clerk got us someone to help us to the car with the trolleys. The Ace Hardware is on the 5th floor of a large mall and it is quite something to travel with a trolley or 2 from the store out to your vehicle. They don't always bring us out to the exit we want so that gets confusing for Oky. We call him and say we're ready and that he should come to the Rama Lobby entrance. Then the helpers bring us out at the valet parking entrance. We have to call him back and re-route him almost every time.

We also went to Grand Lucky on Saturday. This is an older grocery and more store with good prices and it’s practically next door to the new apartment building. You could walk it but you couldn’t haul your groceries back very easily. At some point if he's with me for the day, I might walk over, then call Oky to pick me and the groceries up when I’m through. We joined the Grand Lucky club which gets you some perks, but I’m not sure what the perks are. We shall see. Apparently you need to join/register for most stores here but we have yet to determine the benefits at most of them. We do get a small discount with each purchase at Ace I believe and we earn points so somehow you can redeem points when you make purchases, but as for the others that suggested we “join,” we don’t have much information.