Leap Day Celebration! Student Visa Approved!

Student visa approved, baby.

Happy leap day 2012! And more importantly by far, welcome to my new blog. For most of the people who are ever going to read this, you probably already know my plans regarding traveling overseas for the next half a year, but for those of you who don't, I'm headed to Japan, starting on April 4th!

Over the past year or so, I've been working on--and waiting for--things related to obtaining a student visa through a school in Japan called The Yamasa Institute. Particularly, I've applied to their Academic Intensive Japanese Program (AIJP) for a 6-month stay. That's about all I can comfortably afford. Hopefully I will be able to get some sort of work-study deal going on over there or a part-time job at an English conversation school (英会話) so I can build up a little extra scratch to do fun things or possibly even extend my stay.

[As a note, if 日本語の文字 just shows up as boxes to you, your browser / OS doesn't support Japanese fonts. I'm not going to type in Japanese very much in this blog (I have another journal for that) but there will be occasional words here and there that you may or may not care about. A Google search may help you set that up.]

So why did I decide to start a blog? Primarily it's for my own benefit. I want to document the entire journey from day one (that's today) so that years from now I can look back and make fun of myself and my horrible writing style. It's also for the purposes of letting everyone back home know what I'm doing from day to day in the most passive way I could think of.

With all that out of the way, the next month is going to involve a lot of packing, a lot of shopping, and a lot of bureaucratic nonsense. It's a little scary to think that it's all happening so soon, but I can't wait. Now to sit tight and wait for another email.

This is gonna be a long month.