Insurance

Yesterday we had a meeting to go over our mandatory renters insurance and the other optional insurance policies we could get. They gave us a brochure full of cartoony pictures of various disasters you could claim. One picture in particular caught my eye. It was a guy golfing with a the ball going into the hole.

Apparently, it's traditional here for a guy who gets a hole-in-one to buy eveyone's round of golf, drinks for anyone he sees that day, and send gifts to everyone who was there. This could run into the thousands of dollars, so you can take out hole-in-one insurance. I asked, and it was only 200 yen a month for the lowest coverage, but you didn't get any sort of card to prove it, so I decided to take my chances. I considered doing it, getting someone to vouch for my good shot in exchange for free drinks, and throwing an insurance fraud party, but decided they'd take one look at my swing and catch me.

Tomorrow is the first of at least 2, maybe 3 welcome parties. This one is being set up by my old manager from Ohio, and I'm told it will include "3/4 potatoes". Not the real big guys, but pretty high up people. Which means it's likely to be expensive, since they'll be obliged to kick in a lot more money than us peons. Should come back with something to say.

Also tomorrow, I've got to set up a Japanese bank account. After that, I've got driver's ed. They want to make sure we understand the traffic laws here, so we go to a driving school for the afternoon. I doubt there's going to be anything very exciting there.