my last day in america
Today is my last day in the united states for a month! i fly out of los angeles tomorrow morning.
I am staying in a hotel close to the aiport in los angeles tonight. It is nothing to write home about.
for my last meal in America, i of course had to have in-n-out. i decided to use it to try editing photos for the first time.
the food was great. the photo turned out ok, but I have no experience with photography or editing, so its nothing mind-blowing.
pre-trip thoughts
Per a suggestion from my roommate, I think it would be a cool idea to write down how I am feeling about the trip ahead of time with the intent to look back on it at the end and see how my perceptions of things have changed.
This will be kind of a ramble because i don’t really know what I am doing.
i think i may have to get used to random strangers staring at me in public. i am a gigantic person, even in america. I googled “average male height japan” and if what i saw was accurate, the average japanese man is 5 feet 7.5 inches tall. I am 6 foot 5 inches tall. i am not only an obvious foreigner, but i am huuuuuuge compared to the average japanese person. i wonder if people will stare at me often. i don’t think it will happen in tokyo, because it is such a gigantic city and there are foreigners all over the place. but i think as the trip continues and i move to osaka, hiroshima, nagasaki, and beppu, it will happen more and more. i could be completely wrong about that. i might not ever happen. it will be interesting to see if it is something i notice more and more as the trip progresses.
another thing i was thinking about today - i follow a lot of “i am a foreigner and i live in japan” type youtube channels. one of the things i think i will hear a lot is 日本語上手 “nihongo jouzu” - which translates to basically “your japanese is very good!” I have heard that it is an extremely common thing japanese people will say to me whenever i try to speak any japanese at all. one sentiment i heard someone explain was that 日本語上手 is a really interesting sentence, because the more you hear it, the less good your japanese is. Essentially, if your nihongo really was jouzu, they wouldn’t say “your japanese is very good.” The true mark of good japanese is when you speak it and the response is “how long have you been in japan?” I think this is kind of funny. If i hear a lot of “nihongo jouzu” while i am here, i may make a running counter of how many i hear over the course of the whole trip. looking forward to it.
I have always been a homebody. I have never been an outdoorsy “go out and do stuff” type. so this vacation is a massive change to my usual routine in more than just a geographical way. that is to say, i am not in good shape physically. there is a real concern that this trip will be extremely hard for me. but i am going to figure it out. i may discover pretty quickly that i bit off more than i can chew, and i may end up dialing back a lot of the stuff i have planned in tokyo. for more than just this reason, i have not yet planned anything in any of the other cities i am visiting. i also can’t wait to speak to the owner of the airbnb i am staying at in tokyo, because she owns a travel business in japan and has already provided some awesome advice for the trip.
the two things i am looking forward to most of all are the food and the day I get to go see jigokudani monkey park. i love japanese food more than any other type of food, and i love monkeys more than any other type of animal. i am going to try all sorts of food in japan. i of course gotta try japanese mcdonalds, but i am much more excited to find a random hole in the wall that has the best ramen i’ve ever eaten in my life. or a random konbini snack that makes me jealous of the japanese snack game.
i think this is going to be a legendary trip, and i probably will think back fondly on it for the rest of my life. or, since the plane i am taking tomorrow is a boeing, maybe the door will fly off and i’ll go for a surprise swim. who really knows?
