Moé Moé Rabu

With just under 5 weeks to go till I head off to Japan, it’s time to get some things organised. So far my accommodation and airfare have already been taken care of, and during the Supanova Sydney weekend, I paid off the travel insurance as well as a 1 week JR pass. I was contemplating getting a 2 week JR pass so I could travel out to Nagoya from Tokyo and head up to Shirakwa-go. But given the amount of time between arriving back in Tokyo and Comiket is rather short so I’ve opted for the 1 week pass instead. It’ll mainly help me travel between Tokyo, Osaka and Kyoto.

Now I mentioned before that I was planning on hiring a car and drive around. Well I’m halfway there. The first step is to get myself an International Driver’s Permit (IDP), and that was this weekend’s agenda.

Essentially what an IDP is is an translation of your current driver’s license of your country and is required in certain countries in order for you to drive there. The great thing about these is that they last at least 12 months so I can use it again if I decide to head overseas again in the next 12 months. Acquired this from the NRMA (National Roads and Motorist’ Association) and normally it cost $50 AUD. But I somehow only paid $25. $25 if you are a member of the NRMA which I used to be, but not anymore. Oh well, not that it matters. So all I have left is to actually book a car which I’ll do in a few weeks. I’m planning on heading up to the Gunma Prefecture to check out some of the places that Initial D is based on as well as driving around on the wangan at night time. My friends reckon we should just drive to Shirakawa-go, but I can imagine it would be a VERY long drive up that way, but I’ll see how things pan out.

Animelo 2008 was also one of the events that I had planned on attending. Initially we received the help of our travel agent to acquire us tickets through the online booking system, but unfortunately he couldn’t get to the site. And by the time he did (an hour later) the tickets were all sold out. Throughout the week he had tried various sources in hopes to acquire us the tickets but unfortunately he came up dry. It’s a shame really as it was something I was really looking forward to, though I could look online for tickets, but I don’t think it’s worth $300. If people were going to scalp tickets at that price, they might as well sell the tickets at that price from the office.But now I have a day free and Chara Hobby is on the same weekend as Animelo so looks like I’m going there instead.

So as the weeks go by, I’ll give an update on any preparations I need to do for the upcoming trip. I still got many days unplanned on what I want to do and much research to do still. Not to mention that I should brush up on my Japanese speaking skills. Oh and as I mentioned before, if you are going to be in Japan any time during the 1st August and 31st August and want to meet up, drop me an email at adunATmoemoerabuDOTnet.