Visiting Canada is Difficult...

I've been bad; I didn't update Monday and didn't really get aftermyself to do it. I can give you a real reason I guess, I was busy with registering a new car. But a deeper reason would be I've been going through a fairly rough time now, but maybe getting better.

So I bought an older used car on Saturday from a Japanese mechanic. It took pretty much the whole day to get to Nagano City, work out some paperwork and temporary insurance. During a bit of the downtime though I hung out with a cool private teacher that did alot of the translating for us, and saw the big famous temple there. He tells me Nagano and Matsumoto people have different attitudes even though the live so close to each other because one city is a temple city and the other a castle city. I'm not going to worry about that though.

I took the car in to get it changed to my name Monday and it has been.... a challenging time for me as of late to say the least. I spent that night eating pizza drinking beers and playing video games instead of writing the blog so that's my bad. I needed that though; and I really don't have much to say about the last week. Classes are winding down and I tried to book tickets home to visit Canada. My original plan was to go from March 18-30 and do a stopover in Ottawa/Toronto on the way back to finally experience some of Canada's offerings like Niagra Falls or the capital.

Alas, my credit card isn't working for some unexplainable reason... even after exchanging emails with the bank we don't know what's going on. Anyways, over the weekend the price jumped $1000. So now I'm booking through a travel agent and paying a little extra, but at least I'm getting tickets.

So now the new plan, which hasn't been finalized yet, is to visit my sister Patty in BC March 14-16, then go to Regina March 16-24. I had to use up almost all my holidays for this trip, but again things got complicated and expensive and hard decisions were made.

I'm glad I didn't post this earlier, as the mood has changed considerably. I guess I can write about that more in my next post as it's a new week, but I can atleast end the blog with one postive story after a hard week.

I spent most of the day Sunday with Junko. We went for Chinese, drove around in my new car seeing the beautiful snow capped mountains and enjoyed the spring weather. I found out it was her birthday the day before, so we drove to a cake shop and I got her a strawberry cream pie that she's been eyeing for a long time. She was happy and so was I, it was a good day.

Just can't leave it on a good note though, as I've been getting specific questions and should probably clarify. We're just good friends as she has her heart set on visiting Canada and studying English in Australia for a while and I'm happy for her.

"Don't spend time beating on a wall, hoping to transform it into a door." -Dr. Laura Schlessinger

tnoy