Banking and Mobiles

I've done a few productive things in the last few days. It's wednesday already! We haven't done very many exciting things, and I haven't taken any pretty photos BUT I have been to all my classes My two culture classes have been cancelled, because the teacher lives on a small island off the main area of Kyushu and has to take a boat into university. The typhoon means that the boat he takes to work has been cancelled, so no Tea Ceremony or Murakami classes this week. I was a little bit glad, because I've been very tired and the classes are 1 and a half hours long, which is way longer than I'm used to =/

Well, I accomplished 2 things yesterday and today. I managed to transfer money from the UK to Japan! I had to go to the Halifax online banking website and log in. The internet is so slow here it's never worked before, but I managed to find a time when I think everyone was at uni so it was okay. I know it's a difficult thing to do (I had trouble with it anyway, and I'm not that stupid =/) so I'm gonna do a little step by step guide that works for Halifax and may or may not work for another bank.

• Login to online banking with your username etc. 
• Choose the account you want to transfer money from (i.e. student account)
• Underneath there are tabs that say transfer, international transfer etc. - choose international transfer.
• It asks you if you have a special code, but I did not so I chose no. 
• Then you have to type in your name as it is on your bank account details. I wrote my full name in romaji, because I didn't think Halifax could process katakana. 
• I had to write my bank account number, which is written on my bank book and marked by the kanji 口座番号 (こうざばんごう - account number) and is 7 numbers long. 
• I had to write the name and address of my bank, which is Nishi Nippon City Bank - I had to translate this from the Japanese on my bank book but it's not very hard to do with bank names I'm sure. The address I wrote is their main address that I found on their website.
• When this was done they wanted to make a phone call to one of the stored numbers they had for me to make sure it was legit. As I did not have a phone number in Japan/even if I did it would take a week for them to confirm it/I wasn't sure if that would even work as they might not be able to phone Japan I asked my mum to answer the house phone for me.
• The website I was on gave me a number, my mum typed that number into the automated message service from Halifax and it was confirmed. 
• Then the transfer was set up and I just had to choose how much money to send over! And it said it would take 1-2 working days, so it should be here by now =3

So, in general my advice to anyone who will come to Japan on a year abroad regarding money is:

• Take A LOT of money with you on the plane - or get travellers cheques or one of those travel store cards which you can get from STA travel etc. because you WILL use much more money than you think. In the first few weeks I have spent about £700 on buying basically everything I need to live all over again and all the fees that came at the very start of the course. 
• Make sure you have online banking set up and know how to use it before you go, because it's so annoying being frustrated and confused in a foreign country when you really need money. 
• Check your phone number connected to your account, so that if they want to make a call to confirm they can do it to a trusted person/family member etc in the UK and you don't have to struggle trying to add a new number that you may not even have. 
• Be aware that things in Japan are very very expensive. I'm coming to learn and to accept that things I take for granted in the UK are just lots more pricey here and you have to really think about it. Expect your phone, rent, electricity, travel, food... everything to be a lot of money and budget/prepare for that in advance.
• When your university tells you that you will need about £7000 for the year like ours did they are lying. You will need more than that. I have run through my first student loan already and the next one doesn't come until January. And I don't spend a lot of money on things, I don't go out drinking a lot and I don't buy expensive clothes or makeup very often. You will have to save money if you want to live easily in Japan - I have £4000 in savings to live on, and without that I would have NO money at all right now. 

Okay =] and now I'll talk about my new phone.

I went to Softbank yesterday still unsure if I was going to get a contract or a prepaid phone. Everyone seemed to have decided to get a prepaid phone, but I was really confused and unsure. I talked to Adele about it, who is very clever and settled and seems to know what she's on about and she said she thought the contract was better value. I had done my maths (and my mum helped me with that on skype before too) and thought that they worked out about the same price including the fee at the end of the year for the contract phone, and that you get a bit more with the contract. SO I decided to go for that =] and then everyone else changed their mind as well so we all have the same phone type and the same contract.

I went with White Plan from Softbank (who very helpfully have a website in English) which is 980yen a month for the calls, 315yen a month for texts and a free phone. You can't call between 9pm and 1am but I doubt I would anyway, and you can only call and text other softbank mobiles within that price but it was the best value plan they had. I also will hopefully get three months without having to pay the 980yen fee because of some scheme they have, I'm not sure.

My phone is blue and it's a ColorLife 2 (002p) and I put my cute kitty chain on it already. It's a pretty good phone, you can use it in English as well as Japanese. It has mailing and cute little animated emoticons, different coloured message screens, a cute light on the front that you can change the colour of,a 3.2megapixel camera... I need to buy a USB cable for it to be able to transfer pictures/songs to use as wallpapers and ringtones and stuff.

Everyone got all different colours - red and black and green and gold. Fun times. It took about 2 and a half hours in the store to get all the contracts signed, but there were a lot of us. And at the end we got to choose 3 free gifts of food - so I got 2 packs of instant ramen and some コアラのマーチ which are cute koala shaped cookies. Unfortunately, because of the lack of understanding between us (despite the super good help of a Japanese guy called Shin and Adele) I ended up using my bank book instead of my cash card and so will have to go to the Softbank store every month to pay my bill instead of it coming out of account. And apparently that can't be changed =/ because it's the same bank details or something. I don't understand, but at least the shop is very close to uni so it won't be a big journey.

I have a kanji test tomorrowat 9am so I have to go and sleep. I studied some earlier this evening, but I want to get up a bit early if I can manage it and get some work done. I hope I will sleep though, because I passed out today at around 4 and didn't get up for 3 hours >.< hurp.

I've eaten instant ramen and tofu for a couple of days now and I'm tired of it. I want to cycle to the the bigger supermarket tomorrow and buy some nice things. And maybe even go to Daiso the hyakuen shop and see what I can pick up to decorate my room.

I really want to buy a denshi jisho but wow are they expensive!!