i'm on ep 8 of jojo's bizarre adventure... the vocabulary is SO varied in this series it's kinda amazing, but it seems like it's calming down a little now. spending most of my time these days attempting to get my files off my phone, helping my wife toss her stuff, etc.

wife's parents are being super freaking annoying about health insurance, vaccinations and all this random shit like "check to make sure you passport and bank cards don't expire, omg it'd be so bad if you had problems with this!". look, ignoring everything else (they've magically forgotten that i got a new bank card like last month + we got new passports like 2 months ago??), i heavily doubt we could get health insurance or a new bank card WITHIN ONE WEEK BEFORE LEAVING FOR JAPAN!! so why the hell are they only bringing this up NOW? btw i as an exchange student get full health insurance automatically and my wife's parents didn't even believe me on this so they ended up calling a ton of places to ask about it and ended up printing out 20 pages of very general info that literally anyone can find online in two seconds.

other annoying thing: wife's sisters. they went to go watch a movie in our room with my wife, and apparently the smell of the TEA BAGS in our room were "giving them an asthma attack". nevermind that dust, mold, clouds of rapeseed oil smoke from dad's cooking etc don't give them asthma attacks; they don't even own inhalers or asthma medicine of any kind. btw my brother had asthma as a kid so i know what a real asthma attack is like.

anyway, because my wife's mom is saying she'll pay for it we're going to go to the walk-in clinic tomorrow and TRY and get vaccinations for this one really rare disease transmitted by mosquitoes in japan (protip: if you don't eat sugar, bugs don't bite you. ever. haven't gotten any ticks either. if you eat coconut oil, bugs don't even fly NEAR you!) which, according to sweden's medical site, 1. only exists in certain times of the year in certain locations of japan, 2. EXTREMELY few people get it, 3. only 30% of those who DO get it get any kind of serious effects, 4. you can just get vaccinated for it in japan anyway and it's unnecessary to do it in sweden.

i linked my japanese exchange blog to the international department lady at my japanese school, the one i've been emailing tons over the past few months — so much so that i'm really worried i'm eating up her time / distracting her at work or something. but the school seems REALLY laid-back and she hasn't said a single thing about being busy (even when i've said "you're probably very busy right now..."), in fact it seems like she's a lot happier if she can talk with the exchange students and get friendly with them (she wants to call me and my wife by our nicknames) and stuff so it's probably fine...

anyway, she read and liked the blog and then linked it to some normal japanese students at the school, so it seems like i might have some people interested in being friends with me before i even ARRIVE entirely thanks to me creating this study abroad blog in advance. all the japanese people just LOVE my blog, and seriously all it is is "lots of photos + me writing in bad japanese". i even made a new japanese twitter friend from it today, he saw my blog and came to message me.

she also told me that there's a neon genesis evangelion exhibit in sendai in october; tickets are only 800 yen if you buy in advance. it's only open for a few days and it's the same weekend as my esperanto club onsen trip so we'll see if i can go... my wife doesn't like evangelion so i wonder if i can go with someone else lol. in japan i want to stop being scared of doing stuff/going somewhere alone or doing stuff i haven't done before. and i want to just "ask" if random strangers want to hang out together, that kind of thing; not wait for people to invite me but me actually invite them.