Nihon At Last

We finally made it after more than a year in the making. Looking back, the delay was just about right since it gave us time to prepare for our departure. Of course, the toughest part is leaving Dan behind. Hopefully we can negotiate for him to stay here with us, or at least come over for the holidays this December. We bought yahoo credit so we can call home from time to time and check on Dan.

What's happened so far:

9/19: Our original flight the day before was cancelled on account of a typhoon blowing through the Taipei region, so we had to come back. The NAIA staff was pretty strict with each passenger's checked in and handcarried luggage weight limit which is 20 kg and 7 kg respectively. Since we previously exceeded the checked in limit by 100%, a lot of rearranging was done but we still went a bit over the maximum amount. After we had DIL take a lot of stuff back home, we finally passed the first step but not without pissing me off. I calmed down by the time we took off for the first leg of our journey. We stopped over at the Taipei aiport for a few hours to take a connecting flight to Hiroshima. Touchdown in Japan was about 8:30 PM local time and we proceeded to have a bit of dinner with our new boss, staff member and a Filipino friend who arrived here a year before us. The place we're staying at is not bad at all, here are some videos:

part 1:



part 2:



part 3:



9/20:

This was a busy day. We drove over to the the main office (which was an hour from our place) for a short meeting with the sacho (president). For a man of his rank, he seemed like a very simple man who was down to earth and talked to us very politely. As best as I could decipher from our conversation, he wants to eventually help him with exporting stuff from home to here. From what I understood he'll arrange to upgrade our training Visas to working ones after a year. We could negotiate for Dan to stay with us by then, but then we also have to request for him to come over during the summer because it might not be feasible to do so by December. After all, I can't bear not to see him for a whole year. They've been pretty accomodating so far so I think there's a good chance for that to push through.

Sadly I don't have much pictures of the sights yet, but I have a year to go so there's plenty of time for that. After that, we headed over to city hall to get registered for an alien certificate and open a bank account. It was off to the grocery (called "supaa", or supermarket for short). The food here is expensive but the electronics is cheap.