6 days

I'm terribly sorry about not posting anything for nearly two months, but here we can go on again. I was awfully clumsy and poured some water on my computer nearly 6 weeks ago and well, this was the time they took in Germany to fix this thing. I was really lucky to react super fast and flip my laptop around, so basically nothing vital or expencive went broken. Instead I had just really long waiting time and 6 weeks without computer on top of that.

It is 6 days now untill the take off. My emotions are suffeling from super excited, happy and overwhelmed to anxious, nervous and "not wanting to go". I still remember the ordeals you face when moving to new country from the time I moved to Sweden and yeah, not all those experiences I wait really keenly. But going we are and in the middle of all this packing and last time shopping and husttling, I try to also find a moment for my self just to relax. I now try to tell thrpough the changes that has been happening during the past two months.

Go Go Nihon! and COE

After the last message I blogged about, we went again many weeks without hearing nothing untill it came. The copy of my Certificate of Eligibility (COE) which would grant me permission to apply visa. I received the COE copy in e-mail with working permit papers and with the school bill for the first 6 months. When I paid away the bill, they shipped out the real COE by air mail. It took couple of days the papers to reach us but it was super fast when compared to some shippings from Japan to Finland. The ackward part was a little mistake from GoGoNihon's side, they sent wrong persons COE copy for Mikko. We don't know how they made the mistake, but gladly it got fixed really quick and our real COE's were sent out together (as we have the same address). But it sure was odd for a second.

Yoshida Institute

With the real version of our COE there was also other papers about our new school, Yoshida Insitute. The school had attached really nice info booklet and also a map how to get to school. With the papers there were also our school's pincipals personal info, what we needed to fill in our visa applications in Embassy.

Visa pending and Embassy

To apply student visa to Japan from Finland, you need one passport photo, 23,5 euro in cash (has to be the exact amount), your real COE and of course a passport. The Embassy of Japan is a small place with quiet athmosphere. You will fill in your personal info when entering the Embassy and after that you can continue to do your business with the counselor. We received a visa application form and started filling it out. I was glad that I had checked out multiple small info beforehand becouse the form includes for example questions like "your becoming address in Japan", "the landlords personal info" and if you had visited Japan before you have to be able to write down the dates of the trip.

There was quite amount of hussle in the Embassy when we left our applications, so the counselor suggested that I would come to pick up our visas next day and so happened. All went really smoothly, they called be around midday to tell the best time to visit so that I would not have to wait for long and it was really empty at that time. I dealt with a very nice gentleman, who went all the papers through with my one by one. I have heard before that people have had problems with GoGoNihon for not telling them for example about residence card, but I feel it kind of odd that their embassy haven't took care of that becouse we sure got very straight and clear instuctions what to do from the moment we would leave Finland, all the way to our new home address in Finland. I was wished happy year in Japan when I left.

Savings

It all turned out better than I ever expected. My last salary will come in January so it basically comes tax free and it is all extra for the budget. We made the last calculations about the monthly expected budget and I have to say that this care free I haven't been for years. We honestly don't really have to worry about money much as long as we won't go completely overboard with shopping. It is an awesome feeling, maybe a little bit hard to decribe, but when you have been living about two years thinking every euro you use, how could you pinch in more cents... Yeah, it is awesome feeling to think that I will finally be able to think something else than "can I afford to do this", I can just do it. It has been so much swet and tears on a way, but I really believe it will be worth it. I already couple of weeks ago went to a bank and changed some euro to yen because we are expecting the first month to go pretty much with cash since opening the bank account takes some time.

Moving

Like told before, we have been selling our things in flea markets and already collecting things together since summer, but this November and December, now we are talking about some insane months. We have gone through all our things. I have given to charity over 10 bags of clothing and shoes, some furniture went for free to people moving to their first homes. It is actually pretty hard to get rid off stuff. Really, believe me... It is so time consuming and same time really hard. We luckily have relatives who can take some of our belongings so we didn't have to rent any sort of storage. Now we have basically only boxes left, all the furniture taken away except the bed we struggle to give away (nobody wants it...). And piano, we still have the piano becouse I insisted to keep it as long as possible since we can't take it with us, surprise surprise! Tomorrow is the day we have plannes to have the apartment empty and be able to clean it from the floor to the ceiling. Only minus is that I'll be working last day tomorrow and it's a lot in Mikko's hands to get this thing finished. In our plans we won't return here after tomorrow and so we can spend the holidays with our families without any moving stress.

I would like to write more, but more comes later, sorry for all the mistakes in my english, this is one fastly done post! ;)

2 months left!

Today there is only 2 months left until our take off. The last month was rough between waiting to get some good news about job situation and doing some one-day shifts as a bartender and studying Japanese. Though the last mentioned received terribly small amount of attention between everything else. I have now settled down all the arriving details with our landlord and now we are only waiting for our visas. They should send then COE data for us in the end of next month (November), so that we can do the last payment (payment for 6 months of school) and after that receive our real visas from the embassy here in Helsinki.

I have been forming a bucket list for Japan for a year now and been able to gather plenty of interesting cafés, restaurants, city areas and also events that I would like to see in Tokyo, but also in other places in Japan. We already know where our holidays (two weeks at the time) are settling, so if we just have enough money we want to visit Osaka during spring and maybe Kyoto at the autumn. We also have a list of our family members as well as some friends that are planning to come to see us while we're there. My greatest concern is that we're too busy with school to actually guide people, but that is left to be seen in January. The school comes first after all.

I miss Tokyo so much and I can't even express how excited I'm to get there so soon. Piece by piece we are having everything done for the trip. I already stopped my contract with the gym I've been using due to two months expiration time and also arranged our internet to end few days before leaving, after all we're going to hand over the apartment keys days before actual depart so that we can spend some time with our families.

Here is some autumn pics I took few weeks ago <3

 

 

Long story

I haven't been able to write for a while, a reason for that is that me and Mikko took off 22th of August and drove all the way to the northern Finland to first meet Mikko's mother who lives in Vuokatti. We made a stop on my grandfather's grave in Savonlinna and arrived to Vuokatti at 3am. We had lovely time and I took quite a lot of pictures. At Sunday we continued our way to Muhos which is close to Oulu, one of the biggest cities in Northern Finland. There live my grandparents from my mother's side. The weather was rainy almost all the time, but we had few moments without it as well and that time we used in the forest, picking blueberries.

We also had a great completely thoroughly rainy horseback riding experience. We contacted Sirpa who keeps a stable in Muhos with adorable Icelandic horses. Either of us had rode Icelandic horses (oh fine, me when I was something like five and barely remember) and it was delightful experince! The new gaits like tölt were really interesting and the trip was awesome. We went one hour (half of it in a pouring rain which wasn't so nice but experience itself) in the middle of nordic forest, galloped and had plenty of fun with tölting. When we arrived back to the stable I had literally about half a liter of rain water in my boots and we were completely wet. Gladly we expected something like that and had something warm and dry to put on ^^.

 

On Friday, After 8 hours of driving back to Helsinki we were exhausted, but at least bunnies were thrilled to see us. Our dear friends took care of them while we were gone. The idea about relaxing comeback didn't last too long because we had to start to do preparations for Saturdays bunny exhibition in Pyhtää. So when the morning sun started to shine we were already in a car driving to Pyhtää. It took about 1,5 hours to get there but when we were there we were happy that we left because it was great to meet our friends from those circles. We usually don't meet those people outside of the competitions. We didn't have much expectations from our bunnies, but they did very well and received some prices as well. We were so proud!

It's maybe unnecessary to say that we didn't spent that much time with Japanese on a way. While driving we did learn ne vocabulary but kanji studies were left aside. I'm glad to have this day as well as tomorrow completely free to study and take back the lost time. Mikko got accepted to school as well and now we are just waiting for COE for both of us and of course trying to improve with Japanese!

Accepted to Study!

Yesterday I got accepted to Yoshida Institute in Tokyo and now there isn't much I can do anymore to speed up the events. I received an e-mail from Go!Go!Nihon telling me how the system is going to roll from now on but summarized the application has now been sent to Japanese immigration to be accepted and then they are going to issue a certificate of eligibility (COE) for me. The I am required to pay school fees for 6 months in order to receive the original copy of my COE. When I receive the paper I need to take it to Japanese Embassy here in Finland and they will prior my arrival to Japan and add visa tags to my passport. And all this won't happen before last days of November because the Japanese immigration does the visa results only one month before scheduled landing.

I'm pretty relieved as well as excited that the first part of the paper war has been won now (though to think that we only had to make sure they had all the papers they needed with right kind of translations, it wasn't even a fight, more like a pleasant journey). For few last days all this has become more real and true than it has been ever before. It's also little bit scary and it is almost like you didn't really comprehended what you were going to do before.

Our (hopefully) last second-hand happening is on Sunday and we really hope to get all the extra things out of our hands. There are pretty much things we never expected to sell and let me tell you, if we weren't moving to the other side of the planet, we never would sell those items. But we're lacking storage space and we cannot take everything to be held in our relatives' places. It has probably been the first real growing up experience from this project, to be able to left so many things behind. I haven't even considered before how much unnecessary things we actually keep in our apartments (even though I have moved before and done this in a little bit smaller proportion). Like I thought we don't really have that meny things (and that is actually true to compare to any other normal couple (it's all because of our saving, we haven't had money to buy things! ^^)), but there is still so much to go. Oh well, let's see how the Sunday turns out!

(on the left our adorable Natta when he was only 3 weeks old and on the left all the 

8 boxes of flea market stuff we hope to sell on Sunday

(Natta won't be sold on Sunday ;) ))