Leaving Tomorrow

My flight is tomorrow morning at 11:45! This is terrifying. I have a direct flight into Kansai International Airport, where someone from Kansai Gaidai will hopefully be waiting to pick me up and take me back to the dorms (or Seminar Houses, as they call them). I am pretty terrified. I still have a lot of packing left to do, but besides that it is just so weird to think that I will not be back in the United States for 5 months.

Of course there is a vague generalized worry that something will go wrong with the flight tomorrow--what if there was some key step in the getting-to-Japan process that I totally missed? I have my passport and student visa and certificate of eligibility, but all the same there is a nightmarish feeling lurking that I might arrive at the airport and somehow be turned around. Or what if my flight is canceled, or delayed so long that the people will no longer be willing to pick me up in Osaka. What if I somehow got the date wrong and my flight was actually 2 days ago. I am mostly putting those worries aside, however, as there is not much I can do about them now, and in any case they will probably be no problem. Right?

A bigger worry comes, of course, from the culture shock. I went to France once for 2 weeks after I graduated from high school, and while I had a great time, I was also really stressed from having to speak French all the time. When I got to the the London airport on my way home, all I remember is an immense sense of relief when I could just walk up to a store and buy a bagel, in English. This will be so much bigger than that. I won't be with family, it will be for longer, and I'm worried about my Japanese. All of the honorific speech and levels of politeness are a complete mystery to me. I know how to use them when I'm filling out a worksheet, but sensing what is appropriate and being polite and not offending people in real life is a completely different deal. What if I meet my host family (the move-in is around January 30th) and I horribly offend them the moment I meet them? Or what if I don't get along with them? And considering that the Japanese don't heat their houses, how cold will their house really be at night?

Also, I love Japanese food, but new places coupled with stress and a change in diet invariably leads to an unhappy stomach. I suspect that I will feel sick many times in the first few weeks. Ah well, I suppose at least that will limit me from binging on too much ramen and wakame salad...I do know already that I will miss good Bay Area bread and cheese. Also good yogurt and pizza. And my Decafe (that's pronounced day-caf) smoothies. and pesto. It always comes down to the bread, though. I hope they have good bread in Japan.

It is also strange thinking of what I will miss in Oberlin. When I come back to campus I will be a senior, which in my mind means I'm supposed to have an idea of what I want to do after college, and I will have to start networking and interviewing for jobs. My friends who are now seniors will be long gone. Blogging, email, and Skype make it easy to stay in contact with my friends, but still, I will miss so much of campus life. Some of my friends are hosting a conference on campus, and they are sure to bring some amazing speakers. I won't know what's going on in my co-op, which was practically my home for the last semester, and I will miss out on much laughter and gossip. After 5 semesters, I will no longer live in Asia House ever again. I guess it's just odd to think of life on the campus continuing without me, but sure enough it will.

Finally, it would look terrible if I did not say that the thing I will miss most of all is the people. Friends from school, friends from home, and family. I will not see them for so long, and they are such an essential part of life as I know it.

To counter this negativity, I will list some things that I am super psyched for. First of all, I will become really good at Japanese. Like, fluently good. I love learning languages, and Japanese has been a welcome and refreshing challenge, which I feel I am totally up to. I will get to know 4 other awesome Oberlin Japanese language students much better. I will also get to meet a lot of other students from around the world, especially, of course, from Japan. I will see a lot of beautiful sights, including an aesthetic and a style of architecture very different from my own but that I already love and will learn to love even more. I will eat my fill of Japanese food. I will be excited when I visit and recognize locations that I studied in my history class. Maybe I'll reconnect with some distant family and actually be able to have a conversation with them. I will learn about art. I will become addicted to Japanese TV dramas（テレビドラマ！）. In short, I will become a much cooler and more worldly person. yes.


I will post when I get to Japan!