Jumping into blogging

So I've never really actually kept a blog before...but as I started thinking about my impending trip to Japan this spring, I wanted to find a way to keep everyone that was interested in the loop, while minimizing the amount of emails I had to write; thus the blog! I'm making it my goal to update the blog every night with the daily happenings in Japan...Here's to hoping that I'll be able to do so nightly!

For those of you who don't know what's going on with my trip to Japan, it's through BYU's study abroad program, and is for 5 weeks. This Sunday I'll be flying out of LA on an 11 hour plane ride to the Narita airport in Japan, only to arrive in the dead of night having to catch a string of buses in order to make it to Kyoto by the next morning where our program starts. I'll be staying with a host family in Kyoto for 2 weeks, attending classes in the morning and exploring the cities around Kyoto in the afternoons and evenings. After that, we'll be setting out on the JR (bullet train system that crawls all over Japan) to stay at a ton of different towns up and down the west coast of Japan. To wrap it all up, we stay with a different host family in Yokohama (right south of Tokyo) for the last 2 weeks of the program, where we finish up our studies.

While I am extremely excited and anxious to get to Japan and put ~7 semesters worth of Japanese to the test, at the same time I'm very, very nervous to do so...I guess I don't want to come to the realization that I've been wasting time at my university studying a language that I discover I'm not proficient at...It's a silly concern that most everybody tells me not to worry about; but I still am, and I think that I will be worrying until I get there and start to talk, haha =P.

In any case, if you're interested to see how culture shocked I get, keep checking in on this blog I guess!

~Derek