Finally bought my plane tickets today. I’ll be leaving Pittsburgh at about 10:30am on the 27th and arrive in Osaka at about 9:30pm the next day. I found really cheap flights with really good times and no airport changes but I guess I took too long putting in my info and credit card info because the website timed out and I had to start over again. When I went back to book the same flight it was already gone!! So now I’m stuck with this crappy flight that was $200 more expensive with really bad times. On the bright side, I’ll be flying with ANA (All Nippon Airways) the entire time and I hear they have good food.

ハッピーフライト

Yesterday I had my online orientation with Kate Maruyama (the lady laying on the ground in the picture below lol). The apartment I’ll be living in is really small. Below are pictures of what it will look like. There are two places to sleep in the apartment, the loft bed where Tony is sitting, which I like to call the “cubbyhole”, and on the floor where Kate is. I’m kind of hoping that I get the cubbyhole. You can’t see it in this picture but there is a little window at the end of the loft bed.

I got a new camera today at Best Buy. I was originally going to get the Nikon L110 but I found a better camera with more manual controls. I ended up getting the Fujifilm Finepix S2700HD. I tested it out while I was taking my dog for a walk in the woods behind my house. Here are some of the pictures I took.

Later today I started playing around with the shutter speed and made these light painting pictures by using the slowest speed.

I leave for Japan in about a month! I still have a lot of things to do before I leave. I really need a camera. The camera I have now is about 3 years old. I want to bet a fancy SLR camera but I don’t want to spend $800 on a camera. But I think I found a Nikon that’s kind of like a SLR. It’s the Nikon L110

I can’t go to Japan and not buy and freakin awesome Japanese cell phone. Softbank is the only cell phone company in Japan that offers prepaid services. Their 740SC looks like a pretty good phone. It’s not as sweet as the average Japanese cell phone but I think it’s pretty good for a prepaid.

  This summer, I’m studying abroad in Osaka, Japan for 8 weeks. I’ll try to update regularly with stories and pictures. Please forgive my bad grammar/spelling and bad Japanese orz. 夏は、留学生として日本の大阪に行くつもりです。８週間ぐらい大阪にいます。写真や経験談をよくアップデートします。よろしく！

  The study abroad program is called CET Academic Program. This is the first year they are offering a program in Japan. I don’t know a whole lot about what I’m getting my self into. All I know is that the university I’ll be taking classes at is called Osaka Gakuin Daigaku (大阪学院大学）and I’ll be sharing an apartment with a Japanese college student