It's all starting to become very real. I signed my lease last week for my apartment. Luckily for me, it's a 4 minute walk to work every day and an even shorter walk to the train station. There are many restaurants on my street that I am very excited to try out. The company I work for pays for half of my rent and I cover the other half. The apartment is fully stocked with kitchen ware and furniture. The only thing I will need to get is a coffee maker.
Right now, I am spending quite a lot of time preparing. My company gave me so many resources to help get ready. I have nearly 200 pages of information, whether it be the Teacher's manual, step-by-step instructions on how the arrival process with take place, extensive preparation guide with stories from previous teachers and important kanji and phrases and English grammar refreshers.
I have so much to do to prepare that I haven't had a lot of time to really learn and practice Japanese. I have little bit of knowledge of the grammar from previous attempts to learn the language and I know how to read 1 of their 3 written languages but I don't have a lot of vocabulary knowledge. So right now, my main focus is to learn as many words as I can and to try and piece them into the bits of grammar I know. I am also trying to learn important kanji that I will encounter on a daily basis. For example, this is the kanji for male (男) and this is the kanji for female (女). If I am trying to go to the bathroom in a public place, knowing these two kanji will be very important. And lastly, I am trying to learn how to read Katakana, which is the Japanese alphabet for writing non-Japanese words. I am familiar with Hiragana, the phonetic Japanese alphabet but Katakana is also very common and can help me identify things I might be familiar with.
I haven't purchased my flight yet but that will done in a couple days. I will fly into Kansai International Airport in Osaka where I will meet someone from my company. From there, we will travel to Okayama which is a 2 hour train, 3 hour car ride away. After a day off, I will train 8 days in Okayama before traveling to Shonandai which is about 4 hours away by train. I will have another day off to move in, set up my bank account, Residence Card and in home WiFi. Then it's off to work.
I will only take one bag with me to Okayama while the rest of my things will be shipped to my school. I will pick them up on the way to my school.
I'm having a going away party on January 12th at Benton Park Cafe. If you're reading this, you're invited.
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