Insurance issues

I'm a bit surprised by how many posts I'm coming up with before I even leave. The latest stumbling-block to turn up is what should be a simple step: insurance.

Reasonably enough, Japan doesn't want people turning up without health insurance, and I'm not daft enough to venture overseas for months without both health and possessions insured. Unfortunately, actually getting any is proving a problem. Several companies are unwilling to sell policies lasting more than three months, which puts them right out. Endsleigh sell what appeared to be the perfect thing, a scheme for people going to study abroad - except that it's only available to people studying at degree level, not to full-time students at a language school. I've finally managed to order a couple of quotes and am waiting to receive them.

The other problem is that tricksy "pre-existing conditions" bit. Having had therapy last year, I now have to tick this box everywhere, and even after giving detailed and personal information that highlights how I never even took a day off work, let alone any medication, it still triples the price of insurance. Not helpful.

Fingers crossed, I suppose. If I find out anything useful I'll post it for future reference by anyone in a similar situation.

On the more cheerful side, I've begun very slow packing. I have a lot of books, and usefully these can be packed up and put back more or less where they were, with minimal effect on space. Hopefully this kind of ambient packing will leave the final stages much less stressful, as well as helping me gauge just how much packing stuff I'll need. Another dozen or so printer paper boxes, for a start!

Book 2

A little milestone along the way - I just started the second textbook in my private Japanese lesson with Naoko-sensei. It's a very nice feeling to have made some progress. Especially when, having arrived a bit early, I tried to read the introduction to the book (all in Japanese, of course) and was able to puzzle out a good bit of it.

Sadly I won't be able to finish the book in the next, um, six weeks. We go pretty fast, but not that fast. Still, let's see what we can manage. Gambatte!

Things to do tomorrow morning: get travel insurance, discuss getting yen with the bank, get parking permits ready for moving out. Busy, busy, busy...

Confirmation

After a few rather fretty days, I've finally heard back from the school that they've received my tuition and accomodation fee, so everything is in hand. On the strength of that, I handed in my resignation letter today. It's the first time I've ever had to resign - although I had quite a lot of jobs before settling into this one, they all had fixed contracts that I completed and moved on from, or were day-by-day temping arrangements that I stepped away from. So that was a novel and slightly nervy experience.

I'm now feeling out of Limbo, and able to push on more with planning and researching Fukuoka. I didn't like to do too much of that as it felt too tenuous; I just hated the thought of building up excitement and getting disappointed if things went wrong. I'll also, of course, need to plan to visit family, and those friends who are especially keen to see me again before I head off to another continent! With things settled I felt safe to announce it publicly, and a couple of people who've been to Japan have offered to advise, which is really handy. The more, the merrier!

Waiting game

Still in the unsettling stage of waiting for things to fall into place. I paid my tuition fee to the transfer agency* on Tuesday night last week, but still haven't heard back from the school. The agency say up to 4 working days to process payments, and of course the school may be busy with applications right now. Still, it's day 4 now... I suppose if they put it through today I may hear by tomorrow. It's a bit nerve-wracking seeing that much money disappear from your account and not having heard that it's arrived, though!

*The agency have offices in many countries and handle tuition fee payments for international students. You pay one branch in your local currency, they pay the school in their local currency and take a small cut. It saves on two lots of bank charges, so it should work out better overall, but it's still a bit faffy and introduces this one-step-removed problem. If I'd paid the school directly, once the money had gone I'd presumably know they had it.

Tuition Fees

After many and varied tribulations with the bank, I have finally been able to pay my tuition, which should firmly seal the confirmation of my place at GenkiJACS. It might have been confirmed as far as they were concerned, but I haven't been easy - I won't really be until they get back to me and reassure me. Perhaps over-sensitive of me, but this is a pretty major step and derailing this at this juncture would wreck things spectacularly, since I've already given notice on both job and house.

I'm pretty sure that was the most money I have ever had to pay anyone, and it was pretty nerve-wracking to be honest. I had to get Mum to double-check the figures with me (over the phone!) as I filled in the payment form's various categories. Feeling rather harrowed over here, and badly in need of this here herbal tea I just made.

Still, one more step, 慢慢来　(getting there slowly).

And so it begins

This is the first really tangible evidence that this thing is happening, and I felt quite shaken after the booking was done - I had to go and lurk in a caff for a bit to get over it. The travel agency lady was very nice and chatty; if you happen to be in Oxford Flight Centre, I can recommend talking to Caroline.

The KitKat is a random bonus gift thrown in for anyone making a booking that day. I didn't do that on purpose - I've boycotted Nestle for the last twenty-five-odd years and see no reason to change tack so far. But hey, free chocolate!

And this is where that bit of paper points to. Fukuoka (福岡市), Kyuushuu, Japan. More specifically...

Genki Japanese and Culture School. Slightly cheesy name, admittedly, but they seem professional, are heavily accredited and approved by my existing Japanese teacher after a fair bit of scrutiny. As there are a lot of English schools of uncertain quality around - and I've been a summer school teacher in one organisation that I wasn't impressed with - I wanted to do my best to steer clear of those. Here's hoping! And it's right over a bookshop, so that has to count for something.

I don't yet know where I'll be staying. So many things still to do...

What is this?

I've been running this blog for two years and only just realised I ought to explain it somewhere.

See, when I started writing this, I didn't expect anyone other than my immediate family and a couple of close friends to want to keep tabs on me. But that's grown into a rather bigger social circle over time, and also the occasional stranger, so... let's begin. I'll slot this in at the start of the blog for simplicity's sake, which is why if you're starting from the beginning, that "two years" business may not make sense... I wrote this in November 2016!

What's the point of A Shimmin Abroad?

In 2014 I was fed up of my job, and decided to leave. For slightly complicated reasons, I decided I would head to Japan for six months to become a full-time student of Japanese.

I'd spent quite a while researching this, including considering other options. My main concern was that I didn't want to go to Tokyo, which seemed to be incredibly busy and expensive. I'm a small-town boy as it is; that seemed like too much for me.

In the end, there only seemed to be two decent options. One was a place called Genki Japanese and Culture School, which... okay, that's a mildly cheesy name, but I can live with that. That's in Fukuoka, south Japan. The other was Hokkaido Japanese Language School, north Japan.

I was really tempted by Hokkaido, not least because it's temperate to cool up there, whereas most of Japan gets ferociously hot in summer, when I'd be going. But on further research, that school was aimed at short-term stays, whereas GenkiJACS seemed to offer more support for long-term stays.

This wasn't just an arbitrary decision; after all, you can in theory combine a lot of short-term courses into a solid long-term programme of study. However, I was more concerned about the social and pastoral side. If most students only come for a few weeks, I felt it would be hard to have a social life - and for six months, that seemed important. It would also be more likely that the same topics and activities kept coming up, since waves of new people would presumably tend to prioritise the same tourist activities and excursions. My hope was that a school with longer placements would help avoid this problem, as other long-term students would have done the obvious things and be willing to consider other options later in their course.

There were lots of questions I had about all this, but to a large extent they boiled down to: yes, but what's it actually like being a student at GenkiJACS Fukuoka? And I just couldn't find out.

There's plenty of information on the site, but I couldn't find anything there, or on the rest of the internet, that gave a sense of the experience I might expect. And for a big decision like this - leaving my job, going abroad for six months at enormous expense, and trying to do intensive study after ten years of employment while living in another country and mostly speaking that language - I wanted to make the most informed decision possible.

Also, I wouldn't be staying in the dorms at school like a lot of the students. That seemed to be more suited to the younger crowd, and I'd well outgrown that. A lot of the limited insight I could find was by people preparing for, at or fresh out of university, who spent a short time in a language school somewhere and lived in a dorm with other people of similar age and life experience. A lot like starting university, in fact. But that wouldn't be my experience at all.

In the end, I went for it. But having not been able to find that elusive "what is it actually like?" experience, I decided to write it myself. That's this blog.

What is actually in this blog?

Okay, so the blog is basically serving two masters. One, it's a reasonably faithful record of my experiences, impressions and observations of Fukuoka, Japan, being a full-time language student, GenkiJACS and associated stuff. Two, it's a way for my family and a few friends to know what I've been up to because I'll be away for a long time.

There is a certain amount of hedging between those two; it's not pure stream-of-consciousness. Some things I decided to keep to private emails, rather than letting the entire family know and potentially worrying them... And other things I didn't really want to share with the Internet, of course. But to a large extend this is accurate.

This does mean it is not a particularly focused blog, nor always a cheerful one. There's posts about class activities, sightseeing and studying in here. There's also some observations of daily life, my attempts to feed myself, and a running theme of bread-related complaints. At times it also gets quite gloomy as I talk about frustrations, loneliness and the other negative aspects of my experience.

That's the whole point though, to try and convey what it felt like to actually do this, and that means the little details and the everyday stuff, and the times when you wonder why you bothered and what the point of it all is, as well as shiny photos of looking at pretty shrines with glamorous people.