A great time in Japan, but glad to be back home
At the time of writing this piece, I’m on the way back home from Japan. It was a 16-day long trip and I’m honestly ready to come home, but I had a great time. Thankfully, I can use a document editor in flight mode and I need a distraction – it’s a threehour flight from Helsinki to Heathrow and the girl next to me is airsick. On the whole, I had an amazing time, but there were some really difficult moments too. I went because a friend of mine had Phd-related things to do in Osaka. It was here that I had some real emotional struggles. I’d never been this far from home before, and especially not without family. That meant that if anything went wrong, I was practically on my own and that thought petrified me. I was actually alright on most of the way in. It was on our second flight, from Helsinki to Japan the anxiety really hit me hard. I had to fill in the declaration document but I not only lacked a pen, but didn’t know the details of the places we were staying at. My friend had all of that as he did the booking. Problem was that we’d been split up in terms of seating. I couldn’t even ask him. This was about two hours into a nine-hour flight. I spent the rest of it on the verge of going into full panic mode. We got things sorted, but I was still terrified. That day, I learned that I don’t notice any anxiety when I have a specific goal in mind. At the time, my mission was reaching the hotel. It was after that the gravity of my situation hit. For the first four days, I didn’t leave the hotel room except in the evenings to go out to eat when my friend was back from his thing. I’d say well over half of that was me being utterly horrified by the idea of being alone in a foreign country. The other small part was the heat. Japan suffered from 30C+ heat for 14 of the 16 days we were there. I’d never been in such heat before and I didn’t fancy risking having some kind of heat-induced illness. Instead I slept in late and played around on my tablet. That sounds like I’m wasting it away, and in a way I was. It did help me come to terms with the fact I was in Japan and couldn’t leave on a whim. By the time my friend’s conference ended, I’d overcome my fear and was ready to get out there and enjoy what the country had to offer. That’ll be a story for next time.