Planning, planning and more planning!

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Hello friends!

I'm still in Missouri and will be for some time now. My original plans to go to Japan with a school group didn't turn out as I had hoped, but an alternate popped up and I'm now planning on spending about 10 days in Japan on my own. 😊 There's a lot of planning left to do, reservations to be made, plane tickets to buy, but I've got a rough itinerary set for the time being!

• July 27 - fly to Tokyo
• July 28 - bum around Tokyo (Ebisu Garden Place? Akihabara? Chiba? IDK.)
• July 29 - Ghibli Museum
• July 30 - Mt. Fuji tour
• July 31 - take the bus to Nagoya
• August 1 & 2 - hang out in Nagoya (see the people who live in that part of Japan, visit the Johnny’s shop)
• August 3 - bus to Iida
• August 4 - Puppetry Festival in Iida (hang out with friends who are working at it, experience a ~real life Japanese festival~)
• August 5 - bus back to Tokyo, last minute shopping and enjoying Japan
• August 6 - fly home

While I'd love to do more (Sapporo! Okinawa! Kyoto!), I just won't have time. Clearly this means I'll have to make a second trip in the future! 😊

This trip is going to challenge me on several levels. It will be my first international trip. My first time travelling completely alone. My first time in a country that isn't English-speaking. I've been studying Japanese for about a year now, but it's rudimentary at best. I plan to hone my basic conversation skills over the next two months (including "where is the bathroom" and "what time does the train leave" kind of things), so I don't look like a complete doof. XD;

I hope to take from this experience a deeper understanding of a culture I've only read about in books and seen in movies. Studying Japan and actually going there are two totally different things. I look forward to the challenge that it presents me. I hope that by the time I come home, I've had actually learned something from this experience. And I hope I'm able to get a ton of cute stuff at low low prices. 😉 (I have priorities, obviously.)

Thank you for reading! I'll update as my plans change (as they inevitably will). 😊

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Photos

Mt. Fuji
I'll be visiting Fuji-san myself in a few weeks!