Hello, world

I've started this blog for the simple purpose of keeping a journal of my preparations and eventual trip to Japan. Nothing fancy. Nothing earth shattering. Probably no one will ever see this. Doesn't matter. I'll keep plugging away at it until I get bored and stop updating it. That tends to happen a lot. I don't often have a long attention span for things. Martial arts is probably the only thing I've been able to stick to.

Anyways, onto details about the trip.

Several months ago, one of my friends, Charles, had a job which would send him to Tokyo once a year or so. He had decided that at the end of the trip this year he would extend his trip out by two weeks and have a vacation there. While discussing it with his friends the proposition came up that a group of us would join him for that two week vacation. Charles has since left that job and the business trip portion of the trip was canceled but the vacation part is still a go.

The general plan was to spend a week in Tokyo and a week in Osaka (and nearby cities). We would firm up our plans over the coming months.

At first there was a lot of speculation about who would go on the trip, but that eventually settled down to just a group of five people: Charles, Bernard, Olson, Remi and myself. There was still a bit of a question about that though. Remi wasn't sure he would be able to make it and Olson didn't know if he could join us for the whole two weeks. Eventually Remi settled his issues and Olson decided to only join us for the second week.

The group has been having meetings almost every other week planning out the trip. First we planned out what were going to be doing on each day. In general we are free to follow the plan or abandon it as we see fit. It is up to each person to choose what they want to do on any given day but we have a general plan.

After we hashed out the plan we started choosing hotels. Bernard and Charles went searching the internet looking for hotels. One of the members (no names) in the group has a problem with the communal washrooms that are normal for Japanese hotels so every place we are looking at must have private washrooms. It jacks up the price by a few dollars a night but that's OK.

Around this time I finally got around to renewing my passport. During my last trip to Japan I looked very different than I do now. I will dig out a picture of myself from then and post it with a comparison picture from now so everyone can see. My old passport, while technically still valid, had a picture that looked nothing like me so I had to get a new one. I have a lot of inertia (that whole object at rest stuff that Newton was talking about) to doing things. Getting the forms and the pictures was just too much effort on most days and the days when I had the energy I always forgot. Eventually though, I managed to get myself in gear and got the forms submitted. I got my friend from my dojo Mazda to be my guarantor and some other friends from the dojo, Nicole and Kevin, to be my references. The woman at the passport office said the passport would be mailed to me in two weeks, but it arrived in my mailbox after one week. I guess there wasn't a lot of people asking for passports that week.

That brings me up to today. We have another trip planning meeting this weekend at Bernard's place.

I know this was a rambling, badly written piece of crap that was probably pretty boring to read but I needed to bring everyone up to speed. As events warrant I will add extra posts.

Andrew.