外国人ゲストハウス

In anticipation of me moving to the Big Rose 21 Foreigner Guesthouse (ビッグローズ二十一外国人ゲストハウス) I'm doing this quick blog post.  I'm going to make a video when I first get to my accommodation (or maybe once I've settled in a little bit), so I thought that before I do that you should all see the video that I saw when choosing Big Rose 21.  Incidentally I chose it because Miles, a University of Leeds Japanese student who went to ICU, whose EXTREMELY helpful and absolutely fantastic blog you can read here, stayed in a different guesthouse in the same area, run by the same company, and recommended it to me.

So here's the video; I know it looks a bit crazy with all their murals, but it should be good!

 

Separate to all this, today I bid a final farewell to Aiysha, one of my best friends from school.  She came over to Otley for a couple of hours and we went to the pub with Ayu and had a lovely chat and a sad good bye.  She's certainly one of the people I'll miss the most when I'm in Japan!  Slightly comforting is that fact that she's studying at Imperial College London, which is where Ayu will be going in October (well done to her by the way!), so we'll have that as an additional connection.

My preparation for Japan is going very quickly now, I'm studying Japanese every morning in preparation for my placement test at ICU, before seeing Ayu for the rest of the day, during which time I do all my preparation, packing, and all that (and play a little of Pokémon).

Tomorrow I'm going to say a last good bye to my grandparents near York.  As they don't have a computer, I'm going to print off all of my blog posts so far and give them to them, and then my parents are going to print any posts that I do in Japan, and then send them to my grandparents in the post so that they can keep up with my life in 日本!  After I get back from seeing my grandparents I'm going over to pick up my yen from Leeds/Bradford Airport.  I was originally due to go pick them up today, but I received a phone call from Travelex last night saying that they didn't have enough in stock, so I should pick them up tomorrow afternoon instead.

So much to do, so little time!

James

Oo, and incidentally, I read yesterday that The Libertines are getting back together for some more gigs!  They are going to play next summer (or this summer, depending on the article!)  in Europe and the UK, so I'll definitely be getting a ticket to that!  It would be amazing if they came to Japan whilst I'm there, like they did a few years ago.