Less Than a Month to Japan!

Well, you know, everyone is doing it -- a blog for their travels, that is. And so well, I want to be popular, so here's mine!

Currently, I am a 20-year old nobody-who-wants-to-be-somebody eagerly anticipating my year abroad in Tokyo at 早稲田大学 (Waseda University). Passport CHECK! Visa CHECK! Sense of Adventure CHECK! I leave on the 13th of September to arrive on the 14th, from New Orleans to Chicago to the Narita Airport in Tokyo.

I'll be spending my year abroad with a host family aka. ホストファミリー.
From the information I've received, I've discerned that they live about 40 minutes to an hour away from Waseda's campus (depending on which combination of foot, bus, and metro I use). An hour's commute is fairly common for students staying with host families, I've heard. Anyways, I'll be living with a father (66) and a mother (61) and a pet dog (Maltese). They've hosted students for 14 years and have three married sons, so I don't anticipate any problems.

I am also fortunate because I will be receiving a stipend of roughly $1800 or about ¥169911 a month, which I received from both the George Washington University (my home uni.) and Waseda. Though I have been to both China and Taiwan, I have not yet been to Japan, and so I think the stipend certainly offers an immense opportunity to experience the Japanese culture uninhibited.

As Sept 13th draws nearer, I am slowly but surely reviewing my Japanese (which is quite terrible right now). I've also begun to put a mental pack list together; thus far it consist of 1) a towel, 2) neosporin, and 3) a raincoat and/or umbrella if I so choose.

All in all, I'll try and be fairly faithful to this blog, and I'll try to organize my posts in to some sort of coherent categories. So far I've tagged posts that relate to Waseda (Waseda), and posts that relate to my homestay (Homestay).

In the meantime, I need to open up a Citibank account (which I hear has branches in Japan), and buy some cheap, but decent suitcases.