Placement!

With a slightly awkward timing that I should have expected with my usual luck, my placement info finally arrived last week. I say that because it arrived in an e-mail the morning I was leaving for almost a week's (internetless) vacation, when I needed the few hours standing between me and the airplane to finish packing and post officing and other such things. Of course, with my standard level of willpower, I completely ignored the pressing nature of all of those things, and instead spent an hour dicking around on the computer, looking for (and largely failing to find) info about my town.

Here's what was tricky. The letter they sent said, in essence, only this:

Hey, Anna, what's up? You're teaching at Sonobe Senior Highschool. Raaaaaad.

(Paraphrased for your convenience.) But, so, they didn't say where this school was. So I googled it. And found one page, written by a former JET some fivish years ago. Fortunately the school sounded neat, and it had an address, so I went looking for the town in said address - Sonobe.

And I looked. And I looked. Google, Wikipedia, Google Maps, Diddlefinger. Nothing but a train station of the same name. After forty-five minutes, I was feeling kind of crazy, until finally, in some tiny corner of the Wikipedia hive, I found this sentence:

"On January 1, 2006, Sonobe merged with the neighboring towns of Yagi, Hiyoshi and Miyama to form the new city of Nantan."

NO WONDER. Essentially, the town I was searching for no longer exists. >_<

But, I found a little bit of info on Nantan, which seems to be medium rural and pretty nice? I'm guesstimating that it's an hour or so by train north-west of Kyoto. Now I'm just waiting to hear about accommodations from my CO (contracting organization), and any info my predecessor wishes to dump in my head. Let's hope it's good.

In other news, I continue to be almost productive.

* mailed in my yakkan shomei
* mailed in my visa application / passport
* applied for a credit card

But there is a whole bunch left to do. I've gotta see about making a To-Do list.