three weeks until i go to japan. THREE WEEKS!!!! !!! !!

the VISA stuff should finally be sorted out tomorrow morning and then we can go pick them up in stockholm next week. the other exchange student from my same school, while in general we're really similar and had a lot of the same ideas, she's coming with her entire year's living costs paid for by the japanese government (= won the single scholarship available) so her sense of what's "sensible" to buy during the exchange is somewhat screwed up; like while she thinks yeah, save money on beds, she also thinks it's fine to buy an actual normal full sewing machine while there. unless i misunderstood her...

i've been trying to research about different useful, cheap gadgets to buy (ex. an electric handheld sewing machine) and at what kinds of places we can eat at; but we really can eat at most places. you can even get pure squid legs on a stick from VENDING MACHINES. apparently if you just say "i'm not really hungry" you can get away with ordering any ingredient separately (ex. buying just toppings and not the full ramen). i'm going to try and find out about stuff like if we can get milk delivered to us from a farm, which doesn't happen here in sweden...

anyway, i still have cleaning and blog organizing to do before i go. it's really autumn now, it's getting really cold at night but is fine during the daytime (we have mice living in our house year-round eating up all our insulation, whatever little amount there ever actually was). so i'm just sitting here freezing despite that i'm wearing a wool sweater, sigh.