My First Week Abroad
I have been in Australia for a week now, so I’m an expert on international travel, the study abroad experience, and mastering the nuances of a new culture. (This is a lie.) I intended to make this blog post much earlier, but it turns out preparing for a month-long stay on the other side of the world is fairly time-consuming. Fortunately, this gives me an opportunity to write about my first impressions of Australia, and hopefully...
Summer Brings Change
I’ll include my winter posts soon, so please be looking out for those, but I would like to begin with everything that has happened thus far this month. For the first time in a while, I was able to travel to Osaka after school. While Kyoto is a lovely and quiet city, Osaka is by far better for wanting to do anything outside of sightseeing historical shrines and temples! I got to enjoy myself by hanging out in the city for a bit...
Goodbye 2017!
It’s been unbelievably fun here in Japan ever since I arrived in September. At first it was a little difficult to adjust to everything, and I’m still sad that fruit is so expensive to buy… But thanks to everyone living here at Utano International House, my time here has only gotten better! To start December off, I spent a weekend in Tokyo with some friends, while also meeting up with a fellow University of Alabama...
Autumn Foliage Viewing
As the season has changed from summer to fall, there are a lot more tourists in Kyoto. According to my Japanese teacher, they come to visit many of the temples and shrines that Kyoto has to offer. But also to see the ‘紅葉’, or Autumn leaves. At first I was skeptical of just how many people would be here to see the fall foliage, but it turned out to be a lot more than I expected. Every day, the bus has been packed with...
The First Month
After the first week of coming to Japan, everything became a whir of trying to orientate myself here. There was a lot of paperwork we had to do for both the university and for Japan, not to mention I had to buy more groceries and the store near the bottom of the hill! Still, between all of the work, there was a lot of time to go exploring with everyone. One of the places that we went to was “金閣寺,” or...
Being back in the United States
Being abroad has changed me, and it was for the better. I loved every minute of it, even though some parts were hard. I have been back in the United States for about a month now. Sometimes I still finding myself doing things that I was used to in Japan such as taking off my shoes before entering a house or standing to one side of an escalator. I also miss a lot of the food that I had there. American food is great, but I find a lot of...