Happy Easter everyone!
It’s been exactly a month since I boarded the plane to Japan and oh, so much has happened! I recently (finally!) got internet in my apartment so many posts about life and my observations/experiences so far are soon to come!
Today Christians all over the world are celebrating Easter, and I have to say, it’s the first day I’ve really been homesick at all for both America and my family. Today, my whole family congregates at my grandparents house after church services and we hunt for eggs, eat a ton of good food (ham!), and just enjoy being together for one of the maybe three times a year it actually happens.
This morning all I wanted was to be back home eating chocolate and ham, and just celebrating probably the most important holiday in my religion (yes, even before Christmas!)
But after a quick and unexpected Skype session with my family back home (on their Saturday night) I went out and explored Japan with some of the great new friends I’ve made in my time here. Going back to a few posts ago, don’t let dealing with homesickness get the better of you! Get out and remind yourself why you left your old life and traveled halfway around the world to this new one!
I’m sorry my first post in a month hasn’t exactly been about Japan. I just want you all to know I’m alive and well and since that day when I boarded the biggest plane I’d ever been on, with no clue about what I was doing and no idea how everything would turn out, life has been good. I’ll share with you some of my bigger observations about this wonderfully-foreign-and-yet-somehow-familiar place:
People are nice, the rules of the road are what you make them, no one is going to steal your car even if you leave it running on the street while you’re away for 20 minutes, internet is fast, soft jazz is kind of annoying, sakura is beautiful, wood floors are hard to keep clean, spring is cold everywhere except California, Mickey Mouse is truly an internationally beloved character, teenagers will totally work for tiny stickers, learning a new language is hard but rewarding, politicians on loudspeakers should be illegal on Sunday mornings, you can always hear yourself breathe, fighting in the hallways is a thing here, anything is good in tempura, futons are more comfortable than you think, and I’m always way overdressed.
Stay tuned for more whirlwind adventures!
Ja ne!