Pieces of Me

• My husband and I have to be out of our apartment in Charleston by January 31st, ten days from today. This week will be the last at our jobs and when we we'll have to say goodbye to our friends. However, until we go to Japan we'll be staying temporarily in Beaufort, which is only an hour and a half away.
• We still haven't heard from our employer about our Visas. An alarming amount of time hasn't passed, but I thought we'd have the Visa certificate by now. I'm not anxious (yet), but I will be if we don't hear something by the end of the month.
• I found a couple of blogs written by foreigners living and working in Japan, My Life as a Gaijin and Mike's Blender, in case anyone would like to hear from someone who is already there.
• According to various message boards, websites and blogs (like Mike's Blender) some people look down upon the school where my husband and I will be working. The reasons vary, and I think a lot of the negativity stems from "evil corporation" mentalities (the company is huge), however I'd be lying if I said it doesn't bother me. In all honestly we took the jobs so that we could travel and have an adventure, and while we'll certainly work hard to give the students their money's worth, it's not prestige or admiration we're seeking. However, it still bothers me. I'm hyper-sensitive about people not liking me.
• Last night, after my husband left the house to play poker with his friends, I went online and bought a new digital camera. Our old camera has a measly 3.2 MP and no optical zoom. The new one has 8 MP and 5X optical zoom. Sweet! My husband wasn't thrilled, but he took it better than I expected. Even though we are broke and can't technically afford new toys, we'll use the hell out of the thing during our travels, and we can't very well wander exotic locales with an obsolete camera. At least that's how I see it.
• After researching shipping costs, I found out that it would cost approximately $300 to ship our desktop to Japan. As our computer is only worth $700 or so, that wouldn't be too practical. However, my husband and I simply cannot live without a computer so we'll have to figure something out. My hope is that we'll get a new laptop. He wants to trade our desktop for his parent's laptop. We'll see.