Ichikawa

So, I spent the day in Ichikawa, which is where I'll be living for the next month. I took my current couchsurfing host, Josh, with me as well. It took about an hour to get to Ichikawa from Tsurumi, which is where Josh's house is located. Once in Ichikawa, we met up with a bunch of the girls from Wayo, who I know from my various summer programs at PSU's International Program. Rebecca, the assistant director of Wayo's International Program, hosted a party at her very nice apartment, where I'll be staying on Tuesday night. I move into my new place on Wednesday, and it's about a 5 minute drive from Rebecca's apartment, so that should work out very well. The party was fun. Rebecca and Akemi bought a ton of food, which the girls cooked for me and Josh...once again, everything was delicious. The Japanese apparently never eat bad food.

Regarding work, it looks like I should be able to cobble together an income through a variety of methods that will not make me particularly rich, but will provide steady wages even if I don't nail down a full time job right away. I have already lined up a gig editing web pages to make them look and sound American, and Rebecca suggested a number of interesting possibilities in addition to that. I had resigned myself to teaching English, which I would probably enjoy in the right situation, but things are looking not quite so cut and dried. I'm most interested in getting a gig DJing on the radio, right at the moment, and apparently Rebecca has a contact or two up her sleeve who could possibly make that happen. Rebecca has a vast number of contacts, so she is going to be an invaluable resource no matter where I end up working. The only problem with putting together lots of small lines of income is that I will eventually need sponsorship from a company for a working visa, and I would need a full time job for that.

I'm off to Chinatown in Yokohama today and we'll just see how all that goes. Being here has been a very welcome distraction from the sadness, but it's still easy for me to kick it up if I think about things too long. Time.