ワクワクしてるよね
I'm back at work for the time being, after a mind-blowing end-of-quarter. Three weeks in the office before I head out to Okazaki.
I found out a few weeks ago that I didn't make it into the student dorms at Yamasa, let alone the shared room I'd hoped for--the housing office said they'd put me in an apartment or a hotel, and make up the difference in cost between that and a single room (17,000 yen/week). Unfortunately, I didn't budget the extra 7,000 yen per week, so I'm... how to put this... oh yeah, screwed. It's looking more and more likely that I'll spend my last week after classes with Hiro and his family in Tokyo, rather than travelling around like I wanted to. Maybe I'll get him to go with me, on day trips or one or two over-nighters. I really want to get up and see Hokkaido at least once.
In the meantime, I'm trying to whittle down what I'm going to bring on the trip. To quote Brette, it's "hotter than the devil's drawers" in the summer, and I'm only bringing about a week's worth of clothing to cut down on baggage (meaning I have to do laundry 8 times... yikes). Other than that, for the climb up Mt Fuji I've got a sweatshirt and heavy windbreaker. Nalgene bottle, some toiletries, umbrella, phone card, computer, pocket dictionary for emergencies... anything I'm missing?
In theory I know enough Japanese to get around more than easily enough, but to be honest, I'm not at the point where I can tell names of train lines, etc apart from normal vocabulary. Plus kanji is a bit of a sticking point--in theory I should know about 750, but in practice that's probably closer to about 200-300. Oh, I can read them alright; but ask me to write one, and I'll probably stare blankly. The things are easy to forget when they're not thrown in your face.
This is going to be the trip of my life--20 years old, alone in a strange land (well, alone at least until Hiro gets back from summer classes in Chicago, around the end of July) with minimal cash and an itch to see everything. It's my big adventure.
Hopefully I won't be too lazy to update this thing, at least.
I found out a few weeks ago that I didn't make it into the student dorms at Yamasa, let alone the shared room I'd hoped for--the housing office said they'd put me in an apartment or a hotel, and make up the difference in cost between that and a single room (17,000 yen/week). Unfortunately, I didn't budget the extra 7,000 yen per week, so I'm... how to put this... oh yeah, screwed. It's looking more and more likely that I'll spend my last week after classes with Hiro and his family in Tokyo, rather than travelling around like I wanted to. Maybe I'll get him to go with me, on day trips or one or two over-nighters. I really want to get up and see Hokkaido at least once.
In the meantime, I'm trying to whittle down what I'm going to bring on the trip. To quote Brette, it's "hotter than the devil's drawers" in the summer, and I'm only bringing about a week's worth of clothing to cut down on baggage (meaning I have to do laundry 8 times... yikes). Other than that, for the climb up Mt Fuji I've got a sweatshirt and heavy windbreaker. Nalgene bottle, some toiletries, umbrella, phone card, computer, pocket dictionary for emergencies... anything I'm missing?
In theory I know enough Japanese to get around more than easily enough, but to be honest, I'm not at the point where I can tell names of train lines, etc apart from normal vocabulary. Plus kanji is a bit of a sticking point--in theory I should know about 750, but in practice that's probably closer to about 200-300. Oh, I can read them alright; but ask me to write one, and I'll probably stare blankly. The things are easy to forget when they're not thrown in your face.
This is going to be the trip of my life--20 years old, alone in a strange land (well, alone at least until Hiro gets back from summer classes in Chicago, around the end of July) with minimal cash and an itch to see everything. It's my big adventure.
Hopefully I won't be too lazy to update this thing, at least.
posted by Meredith at 11:35 PM
1 Comments:
Hey there, Meredith, this is CJ from the Stuff To Think About blog. Don't forget, to get the Ajax control working on your site, you have to sign up for an API key!
http://code.google.com/apis/ajaxsearch/signup.html
After you sign up, there are a few tips on how to get started. Read that, but one more thing I noticed is that you have this in your body tag:
onload="OnLoad()"
Javascript is case sensitive, so you need:
onload="onLoad()"
Let me know if this helps!
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