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Browsing Posts published in July, 2006

Nipple trip

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Finalized the schedule for my baby bottle business trip. Booked and company paid for flight and hotel this morning. Here’s the info:

Aug 1: arrive in Japan
Aug 14: go back to the US

Hotel: Keio Plaza in Shinjuku, Tokyo (link)

Hoo-ah!

Prep

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Like I said in that last post, I’ll be heading to Tokyo at the beginning of August for about 2 weeks for Handi-Craft, to do research and stuff. All expenses paid, which is going to be absolutely great. Although I have to come back to the US between that and the AEON gig in Japan, I figure it will still be a helpful trip to getting things ready for my year contract with AEON, aside from being a ton of fun. Here’s the stuff I’m planning on doing while I’m there; let me know if you guys can think of anything else I can/should do…

  • meet up with the JET kids at their orientation at the beginning of August.
    (I might actually be staying in the same hotel)
  • sign up for my cell phone contract, get my phone
  • Namja Town
  • see Shin-san and some of the Kanda kids
  • visit the AEON school I’m going to work at
  • bum around the area, see what’s around
  • hopefully convince my AEON predecessor to show me my future apartment
  • leave a box or two of my stuff at AEON, so that I don’t have to ship boxes of clothes and belongings from the US
  • buy some DS games, like the Kanji Dictionary and the Opera Browser

I can’t think of anything else at the moment. I’ll add them here as an edit if I do. Aside from getting a sneak peak at my AEON life in Ichihara, I think the second most important thing for me might be getting my phone. I’m a nerd, but seriously, it’s pretty much impossible to be in contact with anyone in Japan without a phone. I’ll be there for two weeks, so I might as well get a phone to e-mail people, and that way I’ll have one as soon as I deplane in September as well. I have a feeling the AEON orientation process doesn’t have a scheduled time to get phones, since everyone will likely get them in their placement cities. My only concern is that I won’t have my address yet, so I’ll have to check with AEON if I can just put the office address down for now. I won’t need my gaijin card or visa yet, since if you have a credit card you can start a phone contract no problem. I think I’m going to get a DoCoMo. Black Tornado served me well last summer, after all, and AU doesn’t give me a discount since I’m not a student anymore.

Super Karate Monkey Death Car

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I’ve slacked off recently with my blogging, so here I go back with it. I’ve been in Bloomington for about two weeks, having spent the time before that back in St. Louis. I have the summer job/internship with Handi-Craft Company, translating websites and doing research for them. I’ll be going on a two-week business trip to Tokyo at the very beginning of August, which should be really interesting. You forget how bad your foreign language skills are when you haven’t actively used them in almost a year, and then get back into the practice of scavenging the internet for information on baby bottles, plastics, and retail distribution. The main enemy of course, for Japanese at least, is kanji, which to those of you who don’t know (you all actually do, I think), is like trying to decipher hieroglyphics only kanji are about a million times harder. My work vocabulary includes fun words that I can barely read or pronounce in English, let alone Japanese. Some examples include linguistic gems such as bisphenol-A, polycarbonide, polyethersulfone, and of course nipple.

Outside of working on researching baby bottle stuff, this past week seems like IUSTV is making a comeback, at least on my Outlook calendar. Had 5 IUSTV-related meetings or engagements from Monday through Thursday, which is light compared to what I used to do, but it’s still hard to believe I won’t be doing this for much longer. I think subconsciously I just like keeping myself busy (yes, I consider watching TV and surfing the web being busy), because I can’t think of too much time when I’ve had absolutely nothing to do. Even when I was getting bored at the beginning of summer, I went and picked up this baby bottle gig.

I’ll be back in St. Louis this coming week to meet with my boss at Handi-Craft, and also to take back hopefully another full car load of my stuff, which over the past year or two in Bloomington has inflated to the “ridiculous” level. I’m going to try to sell off stuff on eBay and OneStart, but otherwise who knows. I know I’m going to end up with several boxes of stuff at my parents house either way. I have 1 month left in Bloomington, will be in Tokyo for those 2 weeks, then will be in St. Louis for about 3 weeks until September 7th when I leave for Japan to work the AEON job. I definitely have a better feeling/plan for what I’m doing the next few months, which I wouldn’t say at all back in April or so. Once I get to Japan, I’ll have to start thinking of more schemes so that I can make it big being as lazy as possible. For now, I’m going to watch some more News Radio season 4, which I actually purchased real DVDs of. You know a show is good when I’ll actually pay money for it. I figure just like the other discs of this series, I’ll watch these enough to make it worth it.

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