I hope everyone has had a fun winter break so far; all breaks seem to go by too quickly. It is hard to believe that there is only 1 week left until I leave for Japan. Recently, everyone has been asking me if I'm nervous at all, and candidly I have to say that I'm not. The entire process to date has gone very smoothly (which I am pretty surprised about) and the only things left to do are to exchange my U.S. dollars for Japanese Yen, pack, and buy my host family's omiyage.

 The current exchange rate is somewhere around $1 = 91yen, which isn't terrible, but as a point of reference it was around $1=120yen in 2007 when I went with my dojo. This is a bit of a bummer but I have about 30,000 yen left over from my last trip. I will just have to be extra frugal in a city that has prices comparable to NYC. Hopefully the exchange rate will become more favorable as the semester moves forward.

Packing will most likely happen the night before I leave. Luckily the weather in Tokyo is similar to Cleveland, so I have a decent idea of what to pack. I'm going to have to figure out an efficient way to get my suit over without having it be a wrinkled ball of cloth upon arrival though. Other than that I'll use my expert packing skills to stuff a ton of clothes into a single suitcase.

Regarding the omiyage for my host family, I am going to end up modifying Omoto-sensei's suggestion of a scrap book, and buy a book with famous places in the U.S.. I am really looking forward to meeting them.

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I guess I'll also provide a slight outline of what the contents of the blog are going to be. I should probably preface this by saying I am terrible at blogging, so don't expect anything fancy. My my goal is to obviously post about the different experiences I have while staying in Japan, and hopefully have an abundant amount of pictures to go with them. While I'm in Japan I also plan on attending Bujinkan classes regularly so I'll also try and provide my (low level) view of what we are learning at the hombu. Finally, I am going to attempt to do a decent amount of posts in Japanese. Originally, I was going to attempt and do every post in English and Japanese, but I know I won't stick to that. Also, I have to give credit to my friend Korin for the study abroad blog idea - hers was really fun to read, so I hope that everyone enjoys the posts and pictures that are going to start flowing in soon.


In closing, if you would like me to send you a postcard, please either email me/facebook me/ post it here.