Placement change - 10 days before I leave!!!! + Visa

Well! Talk about last minute... although, to be fair, I have heard of people being told they have new positions at training. I just received an email from Aaron to tell me that I will not be in Fuji City, as I had thought, but instead in Hamamatsu City!

Well! I'll be a bit further than I thought I would from Tokyo and some other friends... I won't have those stunning views of Mount Fuji when I wake up... but I will be in a city that I have already researched a fair bit (as my training will be there anyway), where I know a few people who are going to be there already, and which was originally one of my top choices anyway. Wow. I've spent so long telling everybody about Fuji City, and suddenly it isn't anymore. It shows you how well organised these guys are... heh. Now, while I have always mocked my mother's need to plan what we are going to eat for dinner for the entirety of the next week, I generally like to know exactly where I am going, at what time, and what I am doing. For Interac, I have had to suspend this need quite considerably, and really go with the flow. I could get to training and be told that I am actually being shipped to Okinawa or Hokkaido, who knows!? For now... at least I have been replaced within the same branch, and somewhere that sounds awesome.


So - Hamamatsu City!!! What do we know? I had found an amazing website - http://hamamatsu-daisuki.net/ - but the English version seems to have vanished in the last few days. However, if you paste the URL into Google you can click "translate this page", which will let you read a fair deal of it. There's also this one - http://www.city.hamamatsu.shizuoka.jp/foreign/english/index.htm.
- Here is the logo for Hamamatsu city.








Its flower is the mikan, or "Mandarin orange blossom", pictured here - .






The city tree is the matsu, or Japanese pine - hence the "matsu" in Hamamatsu. ,






And finally, the city bird is the uguisu, or bush warbler!


So there we go! There's a castle, a theme park, beautiful parks and much more (I found all this when the first link had the English page!), as well as many festivals... wow! Well. This feels surreal.

The other thing, that I originally came online to post... my Visa FINALLY arrived!!! I went to London last week with the forms, and gave them a special delivery envelope. To be fair, it actually arrived on Thursday, but I wasn't in so I didn't get round to collecting it from the Post Office until this morning. As everyone else has said... it's so SHINY!!!!!
- behold my blurry morning visage as I hold my ticket to the next year of my life!

It's less than 10 days now until I board that plane. My life is mostly carrying on as normal, otherwise... only without a job... all I'm doing is meeting up with friends, drinking far too much, and trying to act as if nothing is about to change. In reality, my life is about to be turned upside-down (in a good way though), and a lot of people who call themselves my friends now might let me fade away, until I return and we are like strangers. Although, there are friends that I don't see for years at a time, and when we meet up again things are still as good as they always were. I'm thinking of the people I see almost every day, at least every week... that will be the biggest shock to the system. But it's better to uproot your life when you don't have that many firmly planted roots, and comparatively, I'm still floating on the wind.