Immigration / Yokohama / Ofuna

It was quite a busy day today. I spent a whole hell of a lot of money too. I haven’t spent this much money since I’ve been in Japan, even when I was moving in and to buy a lot of furniture. The first of my expenses went into paying for my airplane ticket. But before spending the $500 for that, I had to pay for my re-entry permit. The process wasn’t incredibly difficult and didn’t take that much time either. The whole process took about an hour and a half, but that’s because I had gone there at the beginning of lunch hour and they were on break for an hour. It only took me about 30 minutes of waiting in line to get all my things done. I had talked to a few people in line, other Americans wanting to go back too. That was interesting to start talking to strangers, but it seems like we are all on the same boat.

The process of purchasing an airplane ticket wasn’t bad at all. It was a completely easy process, but just finding them was the difficult part. Everything was taken care of and everything I had expected was fulfilled. I didn’t run into any difficulties at all.

After that I had just walked around and hung out a bit in Yokohama. I did some window shopping and comparing products that I had been meaning to get. But it turns out that the Yodabashi camera, and Bic camera didn’t have what I was looking for. So I took a trip down to Ofuna station. I took the Keihin-Tohoku line, since I needed to kill some time. But by a complete random chance, one of the students that I tutor privately walked onto the train. I had sent her an e-mail not to long ago about her lesson this coming weekend. So it was nice to run into her since she didn’t reply to my e-mail yet. We were going to the same station, so she got a little free conversation lesson on the train. Well more of a practice than a lesson. That’s good for her I think.

I had arrived at Ofuna station earlier than I expected so I did a little more shopping at Yamada Denki. This time I told myself that I will buy the MP3 player. And I did. I decided to go with the Creative 512 megabyte MP3 player with a radio function. It wasn’t as expensive as I expected it to be and fit all the criteria that I had wanted from a player. That was another hit to my wallet, but it’s money that I’ve worked hard for and wanted it for a while now, so I thought it was a good buy. I walked into the DVD section of the store and saw two movies that were on sale for about $10. I thought that was incredibly cheap since the other movies around it went for about $40. It was “The American President” and “Meet the Parents,” two movies that I like a lot. So I had to buy them. My backpack at this point was getting pretty heavy with all the crap that I was buying today. I went to another store to get some school supplies for the next school year too.

I was late for meeting up with MT and the other people from her English Class. It turns out that it was her birthday today. So we were celebrating that and Mayumi leaving for Canada. We went to an izakaya to get some food and drinks. I didn’t order anything to drink, since I still felt a bit sick. But I had been tired for all the things that I’ve been doing today and felt like I haven’t been sleeping well. Dinner was good. I had talked a bit with all of MT’s friends. I found out more about everyone and met some new people too. It was a nice dandy time and I’m glad that I went. We ended the evening a bit past midnight, which wasn’t good since I have to get up early for the speech contest tomorrow.