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Answers to your Frequently Asked Questions |
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Welcome to the highly informative FAQ section of my website. Many of the answers to the questions I am asked most often can be found here. So, you and I are both helped out. How? You get the answers that you crave, and I am saved the labor of continuing to explain the same things over and over again to you people. If your question is not addressed below, or if you want more detailed information, just Contact Me for more info. |
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Where are you? |
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| I am in Japan. More specifically I'm in Miyazaki. It's a relatively large city on the Southeastern coast of the island of Kyushu. It's about 12 hours from Tokyo by train. On the map below, you can see Miyazaki highlighted in red lettering. |
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How did you get to Japan? |
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After a lot of research over the past year, I found a program called NWSE (NorthWest Student Exchange). The Seattle based program provided the right departure time and program features that I was looking for. They were also about half as expensive as the other programs I looked at. |
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Have you ever been to Japan before? |
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Yes! The first time I went to Japan was with The Experiment in International Living (EIL) in the summer of 2001. I stayed in Nanao (North of Kanazawa on the map above) for a month. The second time I went to Japan. I traveled with three friends from that program. For three weeks we traveled around together and saw Nanao, Hiroshima, Osaka, Kyoto, Nara, Tokyo, and climbed to the summit of Mt. Fuji in the middle of the night in time to catch the sunrise.. |
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What is your itinerary while you're in Japan? |
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When I am headed back to Tokyo to leave Japan, I will make some more stops along the way. I will leave Miyazaki and arrive in Osaka on July 25th. On July 29th I'll leave Osaka and go to Tokyo. In the early evening of August 1st, I'll leave Tokyo and be headed back to America on a direct flight. |
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Why did you go to Japan in the first place, and why are you going now? |
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A lot of people have asked my why I went to Japan in the first place. Something else I've heard a lot is "Why Japan?" As a lot of you know, I have a number of asian friends. So, for a while now I feel that I have been more attune to the asian world than the average American is. I'm not sure exactly what it was, but something about Japan just made me really curious. For some reason, it just stood out in my mind as a place that would probably be really fascinating to go to and explore. What made me want to explore in the first place was my church group trip to Peru in April, 2000 during my freshman year of high school. That trip really opened my up to the world and it was my first trip outside of the US to a place that was truly different from where I had come from. In December of 2000 or January of 2001, I remember going downstairs into the TV room and telling my mother that I want to go somewhere--that I want to see the world and explore; I told her I wanted to go to Japan. She suggested I check out the Experiment in International Living to see if they had summer programs to Japan. When she was my age, she went on an EIL program to Holland and really enjoyed the experience. A few months later I had been accepted to the program and was looking forward to a great summer. When I got to Japan, I ended up running into some exchange students from other programs. One student had already been in Japan for 11 months of his 12 month stay there. I think that time was when the ideas of coming back to Japan for an extended people of time as an exchange student began formulating in my mind. When I got home, I desperately tried to convince my parents to allow me to enroll in the same program and spend my entire senior year in Japan. After weeks of arguement and attempts to persuade them, I gave up. They couldn't be convinced. The main issue was the complexity involved with applying to college from abroad. In retrospect, I think it was the right decision. The already almost insurmountable task of applying to college here would only have been magnified many times over if I had to do it from the other side of the planet.
So here I am now. I've applied to college and await my replies (wish me luck!). I'm a second sememster senior and all of my requirements for graduation have been fulfilled. Here is my chance for doing what I have intended to do for so long. Well...comparatively long given that I can't even imagine what my life would be like had I never gone to Japan. It's equally hard for me to remember what my life was like before Japan. People have also asked me why I am going now. The answer to that is simple. The way I see it, this is an opportunity that I have now, and I will never have this opportunity again in my entire life. That is why it is important for me to take it. I still plan to do a semester or year abroad in college, but I want to live with a host family, and attend high school, and those are two things that I wouldn't be able to do in college or any other time. Jonathan Swift once said, "May you live every day of your life." With this trip, it is my wish to do just that.
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Click here for many more answers to your frequently asked questions! |
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