Well, it\u2019s been a long summer, but finally my semester abroad is here. I’m writing from the Dallas\/Ft. Worth airport, waiting for my flight to Tokyo to begin boarding. Although part of me was just procrastinating, I think I made a good decision in waiting until the last minute to write my pre-departure blog post. Even after getting my visa, booking my flight, and starting to pack, the idea of going to Japan for 4 months still seemed like a far-off adventure that would never come. But now here I am, and my adventure could not be more real.
\nI thought it was cool that the pre-departure blog post had to be about identities, because that is one of the major reasons why I chose to spend my semester abroad in Japan. I wanted to use the opportunity I was given to study in another country to see a culture and people extremely different than what I\u2019ve experienced my whole life. I think its important to see and embrace other cultures and their values and practices. I think change is important, especially at this point in life. Right now, with all the time and opportunity I have to explore and try new things, I believe that immersing myself in something new and taking a sort of \u201cleap of faith\u201d will be extremely rewarding. That\u2019s why I think I\u2019d value change over tradition: change helps us learn to adapt and accept new things and people. I definitely don\u2019t think tradition should be completely thrown out of the window, but it should be willing and able to adapt to new people, values, circumstances, etc.
\nI knew going to a completely new place like Japan would offer an opportunity to discover a whole new culture, but also discover something about myself. Japanese culture has so many different values and practices than American and even European culture, and I love the idea of seeing a culture so different. Who knows, I may find that I value similar things, or that I should or want to value different things. By exposing myself to another culture, I hope to find new perspectives on life, and even just new ways to do things or new activities to try. Because culture is such a completely different outlook on life, I think cultures definitely affect how we experience things around us. That\u2019s another reason why I think this is such an awesome opportunity. By learning about and experiencing another culture, I get to see a whole new way to experience everyday life and look at the things that happen. I hope to also have the same impact on the people that I interact with, however small that impact may be.
\nIt will be interesting to see how Americans are viewed by Japanese people, and how they react to some things that I may do differently at first or have to get used to. It\u2019s amazing that culture can change even how we do small everyday tasks. I think that by sharing my culture with the people I meet and learning about their culture in turn will help all of us gain an understanding of why people do things so differently or have such different values.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Well, it\u2019s been a long summer, but finally my semester abroad is here. I’m writing from the Dallas\/Ft. Worth airport, waiting for my flight to Tokyo to begin boarding. Although part of me was just procrastinating, I think I made a good decision in waiting until the last minute to write my pre-departure blog post….<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":435,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11410","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-kansai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11410","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/435"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11410"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11410\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13814,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11410\/revisions\/13814"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11410"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11410"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.rollins.edu\/letters\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11410"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}