Next Monday, I'm flying to Tokyo.
I've never been out of the country before, and I just got my passport last year, hoping I'd eventually find a way to make it to Japan for some kind of trip. Or, you know, someplace in Europe if I really had to settle. It truly felt like wishful thinking at the time. A huge messenger race was about to happen over there, and I'd wanted to go, though there was no way I could afford even part of the expenses. The passport came in the mail several months before I got hired at MIT, which I hadn't expected, and which is a place that basically shuts down for the summer. The shop that I work at half the week also gets ridiculously slow in July/August, so for the first time, suddenly, I had a summer coming up with days off whether I wanted them or not.
People do ask, and all I can really say about my motivation is that I've always had some fascination with Japanese culture and its intricately layered, peculiar social customs. I don't really know why, but as long as I've known about the existence of Japan, I've been interested.
My current job situation certainly does not allow me to spend over a month staying in hotels - there's another, cheaper and infinitely more interesting way to secure a place to sleep over there for such a long period of time.
I'd heard of WWOOF-ing on a few different occasions over the past 13 years, and had written it off a long time ago as something I just had too many responsibilities to mess with. I first heard about it from a girl I worked with at Hutchins Farm, in Concord. The previous summer, she'd spent 2 months working at a farm in New Zealand, for room and board in return. It always sounded like something I'd love to do, especially considering how much I prefer being busy and outdoors whenever possible, but I'd already started working on a responsibility that would devour my early 20's - struggling to pay off tens of thousands of dollars in credit card debt on an 8 dollar an hour job, so this WWOOFing thing wasn't really even something I dreamed about.
That was about 12 years ago, though, and apparently, the fundamental direction of the drive that has compelled me to do all the odd things that I do never actually changed - I hate being idle, and never really felt like it was much of a crime to spend so many years just working and dealing with responsibility, without ever taking off and experiencing things I know I'd love - but I was always keenly aware that I was missing out on a lot of valuable experiences. I would probably have joined the Peace Corps at some point if I hadn't needed a job so I could pay my bills and finish school. However, I always thought if the opportunity came up to take a trip like this, I might still be too hesitant to jump on it, and then regret it when it was too late. Thinking about that made it a lot easier to push the 'buy' button for a plane ticket. It's still a little difficult to believe I'm actually going. But I am, and I've got a new camera and this blog to use to try and record as much as I can, because it'll never work if I try to remember everything instead. I will have some internet access while I'm there, so although I'll probably be really busy, I'll try to update as often as I can so everyone knows what's happening over there. Oh, and yes, I can speak a little Japanese. In reality I've probably spent hundreds of hours at this point studying, by accumulating a lot of books and reading whenever I was on a train or needing to sit still for a moment. I have not really gotten much practice speaking with other people, though. I'm hopefully going to more than make up for that over the next 2 months, and then be able to get a lot more engaged in conversations with friends here in Boston who are from Japan or who have lived there and have years of experience on me. Please check in here often, because I really do intend to post as much as I possibly can.
この旅行にはちょっと困っていますので、よろしくおねがいしますand as a friend suggested for a never-fail charmer - 私は酔って未だご前!
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