Almost There!!!

I'm a little over a week away from heading off to Japan for the whole school year! Woohoo!

She doesn't seem to care too much...

My family had a get-together/party for me on Sunday as a last hooray before I head off :) It was lots of fun to get together with my extended family and share a super cute cake!

It will be so strange not being at my normal college and at home for holidays this coming school year. However, I have been planning this experience for the past years and am over the moon excited that it is about to begin! I picked up yen from the local bank and have been doing shopping for light weight clothing, shoes, and other supplies. I have Outlander by Diana Gabaldon loaded onto my phone and ready to go for the 13 1/2 hour flight across the Pacific Ocean. It will be just a matter of days before I fly off to Japan (which stills seems hard to believe!) Packing everything efficiently is the biggest challenge right now so I have started pulling everything together.

I cannot wait to get to Japan, but for now I am just relaxing and knitting for the next week :) 

I'll post again when I am in Japan!

Hi!

Hey there! My name is Sophia and in a little over a month I will be starting my year long study abroad journey in Japan!!! I thought I would make a first post to talk a little bit about myself and my plans and goals for this upcoming year :)

How it all started

I am headed into my third year of college as a Japanese major. How did that all start? Honestly, I never really ever though that I would major in a language when I was a kid, it was all about being an author or an Egyptologist (at age 7 I firmly believed that someday I would be gallivanting across the sands in search of Pharaohs). It was actually a random conversation with my principal that set me on the path that I'm now on. My best friend and I mentioned that we would love to go to Japan someday, purely because we were interested in Japanese video games and shows. It was more of a novel idea than a passion at that time. My principal pointed out that we could always do an exchange program and, thinking it would never actually happen, subtly said something about it to my parents. A year later, I was off on a summer exchange program to Japan at age 16!

It was an experience that changed my life! I feel in love with the language and culture and knew that I wanted Japan to be a part of my life forever. So, I decided to major in Japanese and dive right into learning everything I could about Japan's language, culture, and history.

College

I've spent the past two years studying Japanese and having an absolute blast! Every course I have taken has made me love what I'm doing all the more!

Now I am finally about to go back to Japan for a whole year! I can't wait to start my adventure :)