Yesterday I headed into Osaka on a day off to see about arranging a visa for our trip to China next month. The nearest consulate was in Osaka, so after a phone call to confirm the details I set out to find the place deep in the heart of the Honmachi area of Osaka.<\/p>\n
The place was a lot busier than the Vietnamese embassy – there were lines of people. Most people were Chinese residents of Japan, and there was hardly any Japanese being spoken in the building. Luckily the application form was in English and Japanese, so it was no problem filling it out. They took my passport and paperwork, so I’ll need to go back next week to pick it up and then I should be set. <\/p>\n
One kind of sucky thing was that as a US citizen I need to pay a lot for just a tourist visa – it cost 15000 yen, which is about $150. Japanese citizens get in for free, and the most any other nation’s citizens need to pay is 3000 yen. Luckily after talking with the clerk in the embassy I was able to apply for a year-long multiple re-entry visa, so at least I’ll have the chance to get a little more value out of the visa if I visit again. Flights are pretty affordable from Japan, so for the next 12 months it is officially the year of the Dragon for me. Hopefully I’ll enjoy this first visit and be able to go back for more soon enough.<\/p>\n
Since I was in Osaka with an open schedule I decided to have lunch at an Indian restaurant nearby, then browse through Yodabashi camera and a monster bookstore near the Hankyu train station. I ended up coming home with a new hard drive for the network, so backups should be more smooth from here on out.<\/p>\n
Today I’m stuck at home waiting for the air conditioner guy to come over. When they installed the air conditioning units after we moved everything was working fine, but the other day we turned on the AC unit in the bedroom, and nothing but hot, wet air came out. This is a pretty new machine, so something is definitely wrong. I tried all kinds of troubleshooting tips from the manual, but nothing helped. We’ve got to get it sorted out before the weather heats up even more, otherwise we’ll have to sleep in one of the other air conditioned rooms.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Yesterday I headed into Osaka on a day off to see about arranging a visa for our trip to China next month. The nearest consulate was in Osaka, so after a phone call to confirm the details I set out to find the place deep in the heart of the Honmachi area of Osaka. The […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1606","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pOpl7-pU","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1606"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1606\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1606"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1606"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/bryan.fredricks.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1606"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}