The Start of an Adventure

“F**k, I hope this doesn’t affect my trip to Tokyo”

As soon as the thought formed in my head, I realized how selfish it was to think about myself when people were losing their homes in the wake of the earthquake. Now, two weeks have passed since the earthquake struck, and Japan is still struggling to recover and facing the serious threat of a nuclear disaster.

I was supposed to move to Tokyo tomorrow, to start  a semester of exchange studies at Tokyo Gakugei University together with my longtime friend and classmate Kenneth. We have been looking forward to this adventure since last year, and as you can imagine the last two weeks have been spent closely monitoring the situation in Japan, hoping that they will get the situation under control.

Unfortunately, as of today, this has not really happened. Things are moving in the right direction, power being connected to the nuclear power plants and so on, but the Swedish Foreign Ministry is still advising against going to Japan, and we decided early on to let them be the deciding factor on wether to go or not.

So,  two days ago we sat down, made the final decision that going to Japan will have to wait, and said to ourseleves: “So what do we do now?” We cant go to Japan, but we are both without apartments in Sweden since we were set on leaving for a very long time. So we started looking for alternatives. Maybe Taiwan? I spent one year studying in Taiwan, and the prospect of reuniting with my friends there and reliving old memories was tempting. However, Taiwan requires us to have a departing ticket booked to even be let into the country. And that was not something we were ready to buy. How about South Korea? Neither one of us had ever been in the country, and we both love new experiences. It was a quick decision, and in less than an hour we had tickets booked to Seoul, South Korea, and a hostel ready for the first couple of days.

Seoul, capital of South Korea

Long story short, tomorrow I begin my adventure, starting in South Korea, and I’m totally psyched even though the plans have changed. The plan is to stay in Seoul for a week or two, and then move on to Japan as soon as we consider it safe.

I will try to blog frequently during my trip, to share my experiences about living/studying in Japan and traveling around asia in general. I haven’t decided what format my blogging will take yet, though I’m considering doing most of my posts as video blogs. This first post was also a long one, I’ll try to keep it nice and short in the future!