Visa and Money!!!

The last time I wrote to my multitude of readers... I just got my plane ticket. The next order of business after that was to obtain my student visa and secure the finances for the four months in Japan... We'll start with the less stressful one.

Visa- Like I said, for this I needed to call the local Japanese embassy and gather some information. Which, by the way, the local Japanese embassy happens to be in MIAMI and despite what you may think with me living in Florida, it is surprisingly far away... let me put it this way. It takes only two more hours for me to drive to my dear friend Mike's house in Burlington, North Carolina than it would for me to drive to Miami. Any who, I had to print off a Visa application, fill it out, attach a passport photo (I have a story for this), and then send it off with return postage. Oh yeah, I did all that on express mail so it was a total of $33.

Yes, you do have to take another passport photo for the visa application. I can't speak for other exchange programs, but seriously!!!! I had to take... about 13 freaking passport photos... well, I had them make copies. When I was first completing the initial application for the program they asked for 10!!! passport pictures. Oh, and they can't be the normal 2x2 inch picture. So, what did I have to do? I had to cut them to the appropriate size, which I messed up one so I had to go back and take another picture... yeah that was a pain. I've been getting mine at Wallgreens and have had no trouble since they print out two copies at a time, but they're about $8 a pop. That would make the 10 photos plus the retake about $48. THEN I had to take another one for the ISIC Card... which is a International Student ID card, it has a bunch of cool little perks including insurance. Well, that makes the total at $56. NOW, I add the money I spent for the latest close up I took and the total rounds up to a nice $64. Yay!!!!


MONEY- This is coming together surprisingly smoothly... kind of. After paying the $1500 for my plane ticket I was at a complete loss for how I would come up with the approximately $5000 I would need. Well, to make an already long blog shorter, I exhausted all my resources with financial aid at UWF, which will disperse about $6000 for the Fall semester. I'm estimating about $3400 of that will go toward tuition and housing. This will leave me with $2600 plus a stipend I applied for through the College of Business. Well... the point is my financial situation for my trip to Japan is coming together nicely.

That's it for now... and I promise that I will have pictures and videos in the future, but there's just nothing interesting to take pictures of right now.