Life as it is... living in Japan

For many people making any kind of change is hard. Even implementing some small change, like going for a short walk every morning, seems daunting and impossible, let alone something as life-impacting as moving abroad. People often ask me, how? How do you move halfway across the world? I would love to say that it is because I am super brave or know the secret to life, or something impressive like that. Unfortunately, I am not a particularly brave person. In fact, I spend most of my time second guessing my decisions and worrying about what to do. Even now as I sit on the back porch of my mother’s house writing this, I wonder if it was a good idea to quit my job, move back home, and commit to spending the next two years of my life and a substantial amount of money trying to get a masters degree in something that I have trouble explaining. But as I mentioned in a previous blog, at some point I came to the conclusion that doing something is better than doing nothing, and forced myself to m...

Living abroad has taught me a lot of valuable life lessons. Living in a completely different environment, you discover new perspectives. You learn to communicate via gestures and like foods that you never dreamed you would; such as tomatoes. You realise that people are inherently the same yet fascinatingly different, and what’s seen as “normal” is relative to the time, the place, and the company. These are all important lessons. While learning to enjoy eating tomatoes was a tough hurdle to overcome, by far the hardest truth to swallow was that sometimes we have to say goodbye. This is not necessarily a life lesson that can only be learned through living abroad, however, in my experience the number of goodbyes that you have to say is exponentially higher when living abroad. The expat community tends to be nomadic, coming and going quickly. Just when you feel like you are getting close to someone, they announce that they are moving on to the next exciting destination. Or, like this...