out of nowhere

is it just me that feel a change in the air this morning? don't get me wrong, it's not love-is-in-the-air moment for me. i mean it literally. the wind is getting cooler. winter (always feel weird when using this word describing weather in thailand) must be approaching soon, and i couldn't be more happy about it.

skipped afternoon class (come on, it's geography and we're studying about God-knows-what in there) to plan my japan trip with aoey at Mainichi today. our purpose is to take classes at language school and we think we'll be staying there for 2 months, with one staying at host family's, and another at dorm. aoey and i still have no idea where we want to go in japan and Mainichi didn't provide us a lot of schools that homestay program is available. after talking with staff there a while, our choices were kind of limited to saitama and kyoto. honestly, i haven't thought about saitama AT ALL. saitama choice was out of nowhere! well yeah, i understand that we wouldn't go to tokyo cuz it's expensive plus it looks like most friends in our major will go there and aoey and i have no intention of praticing any more Thai with them. i had thought we might go to kyoto or osaka, though. apparently saitama was never my original choice because saitama has, er, i don't even know! i googled it and it's said they have John Lennon museum and a very hi-tech saitama stadium or something. right. exciting, isn't it? kumagaya city where the school is located has an estimated population of only 200,000.

Kumagaya city looks a whole lot different from Bangkok

the reason we considered saitama because it takes about 45 mins from there to tokyo by train so it should be easy when we want to (and definitely we will) travel to tokyo. aoey said she's kind of sick of big city so she thought saitama is an awesome choice. i'm still reluctant about it, but one thing i'm sure is the expense in saitama will be cheaper than tokyo. the dorm there even offers a single room! it shocked me to think we could live in single rooms in japan in quite a reasonable price too. i'd say approximately 27,000 baht per month for a single room is not bad at all in japan's standard of living.

it's not a definite plan yet. we're also considering kyoto. the only problem with kyoto is it would be difficult to go to tokyo from there. of course we can, but the transportation expense is sure to be shockingly expensive. honestly, transportation in japan is evil! my friend told me it could be around 350 baht PER DAY in tokyo if you connect a lot of trains *faint*

i might have to contact a senior in my college who is currently an exchange student in saitama at the moment for more information later. we should send our application forms around next month. still have time to think about it.