PIECEful garbage

This morning I think I made peace with my garbage man. This picture is of some garbage - it belongs in the burnable garbage category, not the paper goods one.

Speaking of garbage, first lemme tell you a little bit about this particular city's garbage system. We'll call it your crash course on trash in Japan.

A typical example of a garbage schedule:
Monday - combustible garbage
Tuesday - paper goods/clothes (tied up with a rope, if necessary) on odd weeks; bottles/jars/spray cans on even weeks
Wednesday - plastic (PET) bottles on odd weeks; oversized garbage on even weeks
Thursday - non-combustible garbage on odd weeks; cans on even weeks
Friday- combustible garbage
Sat/Sun - are you kidding? no collection

In my last apartment, I had to take my garbage to the collection cage located a few minutes away from my pad. The place was never locked so I took the lead of other neighbors and I freely dumped whatever I wanted whenever I wanted. Sometimes I threw out the trash late at night as we used to do back in Illinois. Garbage was not a concern at all in my life.

You can imagine the shock I got when I found out my new place had a totally different set of rules. To start off with, the garbage collection cage is always locked...the only exception being trash 'collecting' time from 6am to 8:00-30 am. Next, I found out the rules for throwing away trash was a bit different from the last place...I found out the hard way. I toted a big wad of cardboard and papers out to the cage and was verbally whiplashed by the garbage supervisor. Yes, you heard it, a garbage supervisor! He checks to make sure everyone is sorting their trash and throwing the appropriate type of garbage on the designated day. After that I was sure to stick to throwing away things strictly according to the garbage calendar, a calendar which is free for good reason. It's like the welfare calendar here.

The garbage man has never been fond of me. He sometimes reprimanded me for bringing my trash in at 8:20, saying the garbage truck was due to arrive any minute. I gave a guilty shrug and jogged back to my apartment, tail in between my legs. Sometimes I was REALLY late and had to run out in my PJ's (hair very much uncombed and frizzy...bedhead at it's best), sprinting to make it there just one second earlier, hoping to escape another verbal 'warning' from the garbage supervisor. Eeks.

Now it is winter and I struggle to wake up early. Every day I click the snooze on my alarm and return to La La land...only to wake up and think "SHOOOTTT...I am too late to toss out the trash of the day, bugger!" Once before a LONG vacation, I forgot to take out my trash...I had to bundle the trash up in super-heavy duty trash bags in order to deter crows, maggots, and the like. It was definitely not a last-minute detail I had planned on!

Once my friend Michael got his trash BACK in front of his doorstep? Why? He did not sort the garbage according to the 'rules.' The person actually sifted through the garbage to find something identifying this deplorable non-sorter, finally they found his name and address. Ever since he recounted that story to me, I make sure I haven't got anything with my name or address on it. If I do, I tuck it in grease or something icky, hee hee.

So consider yourself lucky that you don't have to deal with all this head-spinning garbage sorting fun. If you visit me someday, I'll even let YOU meet the garbage man. Then you can see for yourself how it's done here. ^_^ Oh...I forgot the most important part of this post...today the man was surprisingly chatty. He kindly told me tomorrow is 'paper and old clothes' day and reminded me to bundle everything up with a nice rope. Wow, what a nice start to a day, for a change. Maybe he was friendlier because I didn't go out in pajamas today, ha ha.