Okay, so our departure from Japan was a bit of a whirlwind. But the good kind! I don’t want to bury the lede, so let me open by saying: we have a path to a visa!
But now let me rewind and recap a bit.
So as I mentioned recently, our tourist visas were running out and we had no real grasp on anything that would let us stay longer. So we were going to to have to leave. We figured we’d go to Vietnam since it would be so cheap to stay there for a while, but figured out pretty quickly that we wouldn’t be able to get tourist visas quickly enough, so we pivoted to South Korea. (Amusingly, that turned out to be incorrect; we got our Vietnam visas approved about 18 hours before our flight.)
We weren’t sure how long to plan to stay in South Korea, but without any hint of how we would get Japanese visas, we thought it best to assume longer than shorter. We reserved an Airbnb for a month. But most Airbnbs in South Korea require manual approval; the host had 24 hours to approve our place, and they never got back to us, so we had to find somewhere else.
But there really weren’t a lot of good places that were available for that long, so we shortened the timeframe to two weeks. There still weren’t a lot of good options, but there was one, so we applied. We got approved very quickly (yay!) but then the host immediately backtracked and cancelled – turned out they’d accidentally double-booked on another platform. (Boo!)
So, okay, I limited it to a week and looked for more places. We found another one and this time it got approved and we were good. Cassie and I half-joked, asking if this was God’s way of getting us to stay in this specific part of the city, or if it was his way of getting us to stay for a week instead of a month.
Turned out to at least be the latter!
As we were packing and cleaning up our place in Japan, not even 24 hours before we would be leaving, a guy showed up at our door. We’d met him once a month or so ago; he’d said he was going to try to get us visas, then he had to go to Tokyo and he was going to be there until the middle of April. We hadn’t forgotten about him or written him off, but we figured that if God was going to use him, it was going to be at least after the middle of April.
But he said he’s opening a cafe in Hakodate, and he wanted us to manage it! And that if we did, he could sponsor our visas!
This was not just a dream come true because of the visas, by the way. Cassie and I have had multiple conversations during our time in Japan where she bemoaned needing to do something like teach English to get a visa. Many times, she’d said that if she was honest with herself, she really loved working and Starbucks, and if she could do that here, that’d be the dream. We’d said maybe, if I got a more traditional visa (like by teaching English) and she got a dependent visa, she could eventually get a work exemption and be able to work at a Starbucks. We’d never even considered the possibility that she could get a visa by working at a coffee shop.
We need to be in the USA to apply for the visas properly, so we booked tickets from Korea to Los Angeles; we’ll start the process officially once we’re there. We don’t know how long to expect things to take; if it goes as fast, we might only stay in Los Angeles, but if we have time, we’ll probably visit Florida to pick up some things and maybe Virginia to pick up our cat – and to see people in both places along the way. We’ll keep you updated!