One day until Japan!

Hi guys! This will be my last blog post from the United States for a little while! I head out for Japan on Wednesday morning and could not be more excited. While the end of the school year was crazy and wonderful and I just moved back home yesterday, I feel my excitement growing tremendously as I continue to get closer to Wednesday! Over the next two weeks, we will be visiting Tokyo, Osaka, Kyoto, Miyajima, Yanai, and Hiroshima. The program is through the Campus Honors Program on our campus. During the final weeks of the school year, we have had a couple meetings with the group and everyone is very nice! I know a few people who participated in the same program before and really loved it as well.

I'm not really sure of what to expect since I haven't yet visited Asia, but I have done some research and learned a lot during the pre-trip meetings. I find it fascinating how such a large number of people live in such a small space, given the fact that the country is so mountainous and since they must import the majority of what they consume. I also can't wait to learn about such a rich culture and history, coupled with learning about a nation thriving technologically and developmentally. I have a feeling the visit to Hiroshima will be extra interesting to me, as I hope to teach social studies in the future, and this is a place where United States foreign policy really devastated this city, so I will look forward to learning the Japanese perspective and representation of the area, and to share these perspectives with my future students, so they can think more critically, but also globally when we discuss World War II and related topics.  I am very excited to try to learn some of the language, since it has a different feel to me than English and Spanish, and is something I don't have any background knowledge about! Finally, I can't wait to really connect with people there, such as my host family in Yanai and the students we will be interacting with at Kinki University.

Similarly to what I did last summer in Spain and Italy, I hope to use this blog as a travel log, as a fun way to document my journey and easily share it with anyone who is interested. I will share both text and a lot of photos as often as I am able, given internet availability! Following my trip, I will probably make a video slideshow or catch up on posts that I haven't done yet! And as always, thanks for reading! :)