the day before departure

Alright, so I might be a little nervous. And by little I mean like going to puke my guts out and curl into a ball in a dark corner somewhere so that I don't have to go.

At times, I get a really nice feeling, because I know from experience how amazing it is to travel someplace else and be immersed in the culture and the language. I'm so excited just to hear Japanese spoken all around me and be forced to learn it myself in actual everyday situations.

It's just that I'm not that fluent in Japanese. And that was me overestimating my abilities. In truth, I remember a few phrases and words in Japanese, and understand very little. The first things I will need to do when I get there is go through the customs and get my residence card, plus a bunch of other official stuff, so I'm sincerely hoping that they speak fluent English at the airport or they'll probably deport me back to Finland.

See, this wasn't a problem when I left for England after high school. Although that was my first time traveling alone, and back then I had no idea when I would be coming back, if at all, I wasn't this nervous since I didn't have to worry about the language! When people have been asking me whether I speak Japanese well, I've replied something akin to "Not really, and that's why I'm going there, to learn to speak it!" ...Well, now I'm kinda feeling like I should have spent the whole summer revising so that I would feel a bit more confident now.

There's one important phrase I remember very well, though, and I wrote it as a subtitle to this blog in hiragana. It says "Sumimasen...", and it's an extremely convenient phrase, with meanings ranging from "Thank you" to "I'm sorry". And if you translate that into Finnish - well, my fellow Finns, you might understand why I think it's quite handy! An expression that I'll probably be using a whole lot.

So that's enough about how I'm feeling, since I've still got a bunch of stuff to do today, and can't spend the whole day writing. I'll end this post with a few photos, 'cause that's what you're supposed to do when blogging. No one in 2015 can be arsed to actually read a blog, I know you're all just going to look at the pictures, anyway. So, below are two things that I will be missing the most, in no particular order.

Eetu.

Eetu's computer and Star Wars: The Old Republic. So hooked on this right now.

Next I'll be reporting from Kyoto! So excited about that, and a bit less excited about wasting an entire day traveling to the other side of the globe... Ugh. Wish me luck!