Apartment Checks

Part of our duties is apartment checks.  This is where we go to each of the apartments of the young missionaries and check how they are doing in terms of keeping their place clean and verify appliances, smoke / CO detectors, etc. are in working conditions.  We divided our list of apartments into 2 routes.  One day we do Miyakonojo, Miyazaki, and Nobeoka.  Nobeoka is 3.5 hours away by car.  This is known as our Eastern route.  Only 3 apartments, but the distance gets me pretty tired.  The other route, known as the Western route, has 5 apartments in Sendai (1), Taniyama (2), and Kagoshima (2).  Sendai is about 1 hr. away and Taniyama about 30 minutes away.  Distance wise is not bad but 5 apartments so that can get tiring too.  The very first apartment check that we did 6 weeks ago, 2 of the apartments needed curtains, so we installed them this time.  We also picked up 5-6 futons from one apartment that are no longer used and because they got stains on them, it was not worth the effort to clean them.  We took them to the local recycle center today.  It is free as long as have proof of residency (which we have - first thing we did when we arrived in Kagoshima - get our residence cards) and keep the total weight of items under 100 kg.  Anything over 100 kg will incur a fee, but even that amount is relatively inexpensive.  Here is a photo of one section of the recycle center where we took the futon and broken chair parts.  There actually was a line of cars bringing stuff.  Inside the building, there are 4 stalls for vehicles to unload.  In this photo, there were probably 4-5 cars in front of me with maybe similar # of cars behind me.