\nJust a play on words with currency. We don’t really call them yennies. The currency here is yen, and I would no longer be needing my pennies.
\n
![\"Photobucket\"](\"http:\/\/s3.photobucket.com\/albums\/y76\/laur627\/?action=view¤t=photo2_zps890b6229.jpg\")
<\/a>\nThough the pennies aren’t gone forever! I do visit family (and run Disney races!), and both can cost me a pretty penny! During or after traveling, if I reach my hand in my coin pouch it often looks like this:
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![\"Photobucket\"](\"http:\/\/s3.photobucket.com\/albums\/y76\/laur627\/?action=view¤t=photo3_zps062f0039.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nYou can find my first ever entry from February 2011 here<\/a>. I’ll never forget what a scary time it was, living with my mother while she had breast cancer and ultimately choosing to move to Japan. I have to laugh a bit at my goals though! I’d love to take a moment to assess how I’m doing, two years later: Master getting about on my own- Check! I can’t believe I thought I couldn’t hack it as a city commuter! As silly as some of them are, I’m so glad I set those goals! I was able to effortlessly conquer some, work at some, and still need to improve some. And now I’m motivated to set more goals for myself. I will have to give that some thought though!<\/p>\n In the mean time, thank you SO much for being a fan of From Pennies to Yennies! Tomorrow we will return to our regularly scheduled programming of baking and running \ud83d\ude00<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Exciting news! Update your bookmarks to www.penniestoyennies.com! I’ve been getting a lot more readers lately (thanks all!), and decided I no longer wanted to use my name as my URL. When I started this blog 2 years ago, I used it to keep my family up to date, and decided on that URL because it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[36,281,280,277,12,278,282,279],"class_list":["post-185","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-america","tag-change","tag-goals","tag-japa","tag-moving","tag-pennies","tag-url","tag-yennies"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=185"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/185\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=185"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=185"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/penniestoyennies.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=185"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
\nGoals:
\nObtain employment- Check! Teaching English has been a fun way to have conversations with Japanese people, make friends and learn about Google as an American company in Japan.
\nMe with some fellow employees last year
\n<\/a><\/p>\n
\nLearn a passable amount of Japanese- Well… work in progress. We’ll come back to this one.
\nMeet new people- This gets a big, fat CHECK! I am always so nervous to put myself out there, but just a couple months after moving here I made so many friends as a tsunami volunteer. I made friends through work. I made friends through my running club. And then I made friends with my friends’ friends! Friends everywhere! But I didn’t just write “meet friends”, I wrote “meet people”. I met amazing tsunami and earthquake survivors in 2011, and while working as a teacher I meet all sorts of people who tell me about their lives- businessmen, retail associates, doctors, bartenders. It’s been an honor meeting everyone I know!
\nEat new things- Jellyfish. Horse. Shark. Enough said!
\nSee amazing places- From the beaches of Okinawa to Kyoto in the fall, amazing is an understatement!!
\nPart of Todaiji
\n<\/a>
\nLive with only what I need- Will ALWAYS be a work in progress!<\/p>\n