Seattleのおいしい生活 ～ delicious life in Seattle ～

After graduating, I was worried what should I do everyday. I am applying OPT( a kind of working permission for graduated students) now, and can work after the beginning of October, so I have more than one month vacation without any plans.

Although I don’t have many plans, I am having fun these days. I am trying to go out instead of be at home except researching jobs on the Internet since my priority is finding a job. I spend time with friends, take a walk, or do exercise. And from tomorrow, my life will change a little bit for 10 days. My host family will go to Minnesota for vacation. Even though it is just 10 days, I am nervous a little bit and excited because I haven’t lived alone since I came to the US. I think I will enjoy it. 

この間学校を卒業したわけですが、いつ帰ってくるのというメールをしばしばいただきます。最初のプランでは、勉強を終えたらしばらくアメリカを旅行して日本に帰る予定でした。でもちょっと状況が変わって帰国をしばらく延ばすことにしました。今OPTを申請しています。OPTというのは学校を卒業した留学生が取得できる就労許可証のようなもので、1年間アメリカで働くことができます。労働ビザを取得するのは厳しい昨今、せっかくのチャンスを逃す手はないということで、これに挑戦することにしました。実はずっと前から考えていたことだったんですが、私の帰国を待っている日本の家族に言い出しにくくて決心するのを延ばし延ばしにしていたんですが、この間やっとその旨を告げたところ、割とすんなりわかってくれました。良かった！

といっても雇ってくれる会社は自分で探さないといけないし、OPTの学生を雇ってくれる会社を見つけるのはかなり大変なことらしいのでどうなるかはわかりませんが、とにかく頑張ってみようと思っています。もし2,3ヶ月就職活動をしても無理なら帰国かなあと考えています。日本で就職を探すのも難しいでしょうけど。。。とにかく今やれることをやるのみ！

ところで話は変わりますが、明日からちょっとした一人暮らしが始まります。というのはホストファミリーが10日間の休暇を取ってホストファザーの実家があるミネソタ州に出掛けるからです。たった10日間といえども、アメリカでの一人暮らしは初めてなので心配もありますが、結構わくわくしています。

写真は今日ダウンタウンで撮ったもの。ウェストレイクセンターというダウンタウンの中心にあるビルの前でSand festaというのが行われていました。これらは全部砂でできているんですよ！昔日本で住んでいたところで行われていた砂まつりのようです（といっても実は行ったことはないんですけど）

I graduated from my school tonight (actually just finished my program though…).

This past one and half a year was a hard period for me. For the first half a year, I suffered from handling tons of homework everyday in ESL. Writing essays and Reading novels made me sick, and the most difficult thing was speaking. (still it is though...) I was happy when I finished ESL class!

My hard time, however, didn’t go away. As you can guess, the college classes were much harder than ESL. English, HTML, CSS, JavaScript, and Visual Basic…I had enough stuff which could kill me. I can not forget the first class in college. I had no idea I could manage it because I could not understand what was going on in the class. I wanted to go back to ESL class and study with international students because there was no international student in my classes at all until this quarter. I often wondered I made a mistake to come here and should go back to Japan to study them in Japanese.

But I was getting used to English little by little, and it gave me confidence little by little. Eventually I could finish my program. Thank you very much to all of my friends who helped me when I had a hard time. I will never forget it. I had a great, wonderful, fabulous time at SCCC.

Viva! Seattle.

今日学校を卒業しました。正確に言うとプログラムを終えただけなんですけど。
この一年半は波瀾万丈の日々でした。でも、晴れて今日を迎えることができました。自分ながらよく頑張ったと思います。
今日は自分を褒めてあげたいと思います。

I haven’t been here for a long time. I have been busy because of my project as well as every end of quarters. I haven’t finished them yet, but I took a break today.

One of my friend will go back to Indonesia for summer vacation. He was asked by his cousin to buy some stuffs, so we went to Costco.

 At Costco I found good things for me, a USB flash drive and a SD card for my digital camera. I wanted to buy both of them, and fortunately they were on sale today. I got both of them for only $65 + $30( mail-in-rebate).

By the way, I don’t like this mail-in-rebate system. This is not too much work but too annoying!  It prevents me from buying products all the time. Although the cheap price won a battle against my feeling this time, this is obvious that this rebate system lose lots of expense of customers. Or do the shops expect the customers to forget it or not to do the annoying work? Are there anybody who love this system? Please make products cheaper without this.