woah!! jobhunting!!

So, I finally got my spouse visa! I went to the Tokyo immigration office yesterday to pick it up (er, get my passport stamped), and they gave me a 3-year visa! That's good news, according to many accounts they noramally start you on a 1-year visa that you have to renew a few times, then they upgrade you to a 3-year, and after you renew that a couple of times, you can apply for a permanent resident visa. And THEN.. if you're really GOOD, you can apply for citizenship. Man, is America this crazy? ... at least I got a couple of years of a head start.

Anyways, what that means is that I can work! Legally! I got it last week, and now it's Friday of the following week, so I thought I'd take my lazy butt down to the employment center for foreigners finally, instead of playing 'Legend of Zelda, Ocarina of Time' like usual (I beat FFX-2 already. See why I need a job? ^^). I highly recommend 'Hello Work Shinjuku', they have a ton of companies looking for workers in every occupation. You go there, look up promising looking places in their computer, print them out and bring the papers to the desk, and one of the employees will call all the places you bring up on your behalf, then let you talk to them. When I left the office, I already had an interview lined up and several places promising to call me back. What I wasn't expecting was my phone ringing all afternoon!!

It's nerve-racking enough to get a phone call pertaining to a job offer, it's much worse when it's in another language, and it's much much more nerve-wracking when they use super polite speech so I keep having to ask them to repeat themselves. eeep!! I had about five of these calls! And now I have two more interviews lined up!! So very quickly I have to figure out how not to sound like a complete idiot before tomorrow, and look nice. And this week Takeshi's out of town, so he can't help me *waaah*.

Hee hee, the reason he's out of town is amusing, so I'll tell ya. He works as a financial consultant ( I think?) at a bank that deals mostly with agricultural stock and farms. It sounds weird, but it's a very large company. Since they deal with a lot of agricultural industries, they send all of their new employees around the countryside to 'experience agriculture'. ^_^ So these last two weeks he's been sent around to *cut rice *plant mushrooms *work in a flower farm *milk cows... hee hee! Sounds like a late summer vacation, if you ask me. He said they work him really hard, though ^^ (I can just imagine the farmers saying "let's teach these city boys a thing or two about REAL WORK!!") haha, poor baby ^_~ Well, here I go to cram super polite Japanese. Wish me luck on my interviews!!