Stuff To Do in the Interim

hey there,

So there are several things I should get done before heading off to Japan.

1. Doctor check-up
2. Buy plane ticket
3. Get International Driver's Permit
4. Get Visa
5. Continue Studying Japanese

The only one of these that I can really do at any time or place is study Japanese, which is actually pretty easy. At least, it is since I've already learned the material that I'm trying to re-learn, and so a lot of it is coming back. The big hurdle is going to be (re-)learning kanji, which are the Chinese characters imported to Japan through Korean Buddhist monks over several centuries.
As a linguistic side note, these are actually kind of interesting. Often times what the Japanese would do is take a Chinese character (as a made up example, the character for water) that was pronounced similarly to a native Japanese word, or that at least had the same initial sound, and use that character for that word (for instance, the Japanese word for love). So the character used (water), and the Japanese word (love), have nothing in common other than (initial) sound. Compound these kinds of borrowings over several hundred years of iterations, and you have kanji as they exist today.
Some, of course, still make sense: the kanji for "rest" looks kinda like a person leaning against a tree (it is literally the kanji for "person" scrunched next to the kanji for "tree"); the kanji for "go" is basically "person" plus some motion lines (like in a comic book or cartoon), etc.
Somewhat frustrating is the fact that my family is currently undertaking a kind of living Zeno's paradox experiment. Each day of traveling, it feels like we are only going half of the total remaining distance, so although technically we get closer, we never actually get there.

Cheers