Moving along

I've gotten my response that my paperwork arrived at the Consulate, and as I haven't heard anything else, and that's a good thing.

I went to the Consulate General's house on Thursday, for Japanese conversation practice and dinner. I was rusty, but it was fun, met some new people, who I have to email back. I couldn't during my lunch break on Friday, because the school doesn't have Japanese language installed on any of the computers, so I couldn't read her message. Ah well.

For today, I hope to get all of my homework done, so tomorrow I can go to the Ren fest and take pictures to put in an album to bring to Japan. To show my new students what kind of things we do for fun. My first week off school I plan to get a City pass and for $60 (I think) go to the Aquarium, World of Coke, Fernbank, the Zoo, and one other place that I can't remember. All for the pictures and the album and the "this is my city, kids." It should be fun.

I want to go ahead and get all of my things ready to leave, but as I don't even know where I'm going to be, and don't know what grades I'll be working with, this would be silly. The JET message boards are all saying don't bring stuff, you won't use it. But I think this is more along the lines of, don't bring teaching English stuff. I want to bring books (realia, native stuff made for the native speakers of the language that can be used in foreign language education), just for easy things, like Richard Scarry, or Freeyman's books where they take different fruits and veggies and put names on them like numbers, shapes, feelings and what not. It looks neat (to capture the children's attention) and is educational. Weeee.

I also need to buy a laptop, but have heard so many contrasting facts that I'm confused about what I should buy. I'm leaning towards a Macbook Pro, because, with a free download, I can boot in Windows, which I understand, unlike the MacOS, which I can use, but makes no real sense to me. That way I can talk to whatever OS they are running overthere with hopefully no worries. But it would be buying a Mac, which to me is scarry.

Ah well. More thoughts later. (ps: I'm so excited!)