Man, jet fuel is expensive...

Right now its looking to be about 4k for us to come back in august. That seems like a lot but Andrea really wants to try and make it back so I think we're going to shoot for it. We might be able to get at least a 1k off by actually going to the STA travel agency in japan, they give discounts to JETs. That would help a lot. Even with the higher prices in japan (3900 for both rather than 3700) and the extra costs on the credit card associated with international purchases, it would save us 500+. we'll probably look at it more seriously closer to the end of march when prices will get close to the bottom, and we'll have a better idea what we'll have to spend. On top of plane tickets, we'll have to spend 300ish on trains for both there and back, as well as money for sending out bags to and from the airport (because tokyo station = crappy with more than one bag). Potentially another 1k for a hotel room if we decide/can't get a place to stay while we're there. On top of all that, Andrea is going to want to shop, maybe I will too. That I would expect will set us back another 1k. So I'm expecting 6k to come home and visit. Obviously that should be a little high, but I'd rather plan for more and have extra money leftover, than not enough and haveing 4k sitting on my credit card for 6 months. We'll see what happens, if we decide we can't save the money or we can't make the days work, we won't do it. Its at least something to look forward to!

Woo, Time Flies...

I really didn't intend for three and a half weeks to go by without posting anything, but that's what happened. Andrea and I have been dealing with settling back in, figuring out what to do about staying or moving back, as well as looking at plane prices for a variety of trips we could take depending on what we decided to do.

We did decide we're probably staying put for the next year and a half. The downside of that is, we wanted to come back to Wichita for 10 days in August, but Andrea's school has 4 required days that they will not give vacation for, one is on the 8th the rest are from the 20th-22nd. That gives us a 10 day window of travelling time, but when you include 2 days of actually traveling plus a day for jet lag recovery, that gives us a solid 6 or 7 days to visit, and that seems worthless. We want to try and work something out, but we're just not sure when we could fit the time. School starts back up at the beginning of September for Andrea so we can't go then. My family is going to be in Japan until the 31st of August so we wouldn't be able to go then (although Andrea may be accompanying her 2nd year class to Australia for the first week of July, so traveling in July would be hard anyways.) Either way its hard to figure out what exactly to do. The cheapest prices for tickets to ICT was from the 6th until the 18th, so changing that will cause the price to jump 500 a person. We'll figure something out. Andrea was thinking maybe xmas, who knows.

Oh and I would like to mentiopn that for the first time in well over a decade, I ate and enjoyed fish. Yes, that's right, FISH. One was tuna I'm sure. The other was unknown. The third was crab, not a fish, but all seafood has tasted the same for the last 12? years. If you can imagine, for me, every piece of fish tasted like it was going bad. Everyone has had bad fish, knows that taste. I tasted that every time, until last night. The texture freaked me out a little, but I didn't gag. I even enjoyed the crab, so much so that I finished what Andrea did not. Maybe it was the beer, but it was pretty darn good. Hopefully this is the start of actually being able to eat fish. Of course then I read an article about how tuna is showing signs of high mercury. Great.

We're going to Sapporro next weekend for the start of the snow festival. Hopefully we'll get to see some neat stuff. It snowed for the first time in Fuji early last week. It even stuck to the ground for a few hours. There ought to be more when we get to Hokkaido. They make massive sculptures and mazes out of snow. Last year they had to truck it in, but it seems that it will be snowing the days before we get there, so they might not have to this year. I'm expecting to take a lot of pictures, so look for that the 2nd week of February.

Going Home

We leave in the morning, I just uploaded the last of our pictures. The total is almost 300 now, I'm sure I need to delete some, but I'll check that out on monday once I have time. Andrea has the rest of the week off (vacation) so I won't get a chance until then. I'll post again about the trip in a few days.