#1 “I’m Going on an Adventure”

 At the age of thirty-two, I have now moved thirty-four times in my life. My family seems to think I’m possessed by some spirit of wanderlust, a devil of adventure perched firmly on my shoulder, begging for me to journey over the next horizon, yearning for a new experience, demanding the challenge and chance to become a new person. And soon, the most challenging and demanding of my adventures will begin. In March, I start move number thirty-five, this time to a place where I am still learning the language, the culture, and the customs: the North Kanto region of Japan.

For my fellow Pokémon fans out there, you heard me right: Kanto. The six-year-old me would be overawed at the prospect of moving to the home of my favorite electric mouse and capitalist cat. To be more specific, I am going to be moving to the countryside surrounding the world’s biggest city of Tokyo, working for the “largest provider of professional foreign teachers to the Japanese government,” Link Interac Inc. While I wait for my certificate of eligibility, a crucial document to get a work visa, and worry over where the company plans to place me, I wanted to take a second to try and peel apart this craving of mine, to dissect where it came from and understand why I have this longing to get out into the world.

I figured one way I could do this is by starting a little blog of my own, a personal travel blog, just for friends and family (and maybe the odd stranger who somehow stumbles across this). Something I could update every other week, post some pictures, offer some experiences and advice, nothing too formal. Just a fun little way to update anyone who is interested all at once. And while I could do a travel vlog or become a YouTuber or digital content creator, writing has always been more my speed. That isn’t to say I might not start a channel or post some videos soon, but this seems like a good way to get started.

So…let’s start at the beginning…

If I had to make a safe assumption, it would be that I am a tad unusual when compared to the rest of my family and neighbors. As someone who was born in Appalachia, I can tell you that we aren’t a region known for our thirst for the outside world. Appalachia is a special place – secluded and cloistered since the olden days, tinged with a touch of hodophobia, most of us rarely leaving our Mountain Mama and with no strong desire to do so. Many of my family members spent their entire lives nestled in these hollers, never leaving the comfort and closeness of our ridgelines. I can still recall the yearly cajoling and begging my mom used to do to get my grandpa to leave his house to go on vacation to the beach. It just wasn’t something that interested him, even if he didn’t have to pay for it!

I have often heard Appalachia compared to the Shire from The Lord of the Rings, our people not dissimilar to the hobbits of those stories. Adventures are seen as a “nasty, terrible, uncomfortable things” that will most certainly make you late for the comfortable dinners of gravies and home-fried goodies from the garden. If West Virginia is akin to the Shire, then I suppose it wouldn’t be too much of a stretch to say that I share some similarity with Bilbo and Frodo Baggins, raised up in an adventurous branch of the family tree.

When I was seven years old, my parents picked up all their things and took off 1,700 miles from friends, family, and familiar flavors. While they weren’t the first or the farthest since our great-great-great-greats moved into the hills, they were the first to do so without the provocation of war to motivate them. My dad had been offered a career opportunity as a manager of shipping warehouses in Billings, MT and they had decided it was time for a change of pace. A time for a little adventure.

I don’t remember much about how I was feeling at the time. Probably some excitement, some anxiety. What I do distinctly remember, though, is crying as I got off the bus on my last day of school before the Christmas holidays, sobbing as I walked up the old farm road with my little sister following behind me. I didn’t understand the full implications of what we were about to do, but even my little elementary-schooler brain realized that I was about to say goodbye to all my friends, my cherished grandparents, and the cozy, trash-laden creeks of our home. It seemed so final. So definitive. So scary.

We left West Virginia at the start of 2001, trading in our “once-family-store-turned-house” for a “parade of homes” in the biggest city in Montana. Let’s set the record straight first: Billings was (and to my knowledge still is) not that big of a city. At just under 100,000 people in 2001, there is only a handful of states in the U.S. whose biggest city is smaller (West Virginia’s Charleston being one of them). But still, actually living in a “city” was such a radical change for me. Suddenly we didn’t just do our grocery shopping at Foodland or Save-a-Lot, but we could go to an actual Wal-Mart. And while Billings, MT didn’t have malls as cool as the ones back home, they did have their own airport and a huge stadium for monster truck rallies and rodeos. Endless shopping outlets. Hot spring resorts, museums, and water parks.

We might have technically just traded one form of country living for another, but still! For living in the same nation, there was a tremendous amount of culture shock that I experienced. Some initial impressions that surprised me:

1. They didn’t eat biscuits and gravy for breakfast
2. They hadn’t never seen a firefly
3. They never had to chase a possum off the front porch
4. They didn’t call their grandparents “mamaw” and “papaw”
5. If I said I wanted a “pop” to drink or a “poke” to put my drink in, they would wonder why I wanted them to do violence to me

But this was just a small list of the many things that made living in a new place challenging. Did I mention that my hillbilly accent was so thick, I was put into speech therapy almost immediately and stayed there the entire time I lived in Montana? Talk about feeling out of place…you use the same language as other people, but they have a hard time understanding you because of dialectical differences. It was a rude awakening on how different language could be. And probably where my obsession with language truly began.

However, not all my first experiences were negative ones. While in Montana, we got to see the world’s first national park, Yellowstone, and took yearly trips to see the geothermal and zoological wonders (getting up close and personal with bison, moose, and grizzly bears is not an experience you can get back in Appalachia). We got to fly on airplanes about two times a year, always going back to West Virginia for summer vacations. I got to see real, honest to God snow for the first time in my life, with the accumulation averaging around twice the amount we would see in West Virginia (i.e. 158 inches annually in Montana versus West Virginia’s 68 inches). All in all, I found Montana to be a wonderfully different, fascinating place, a cultural and natural landscape unlike anything I had experienced up to that point. I think, from that early foundation, I learned to love to travel.

From this formative early experience, I have now traveled to thirty-nine of the fifty states in America. Of those, I have lived in two others apart from West Virginia: Columbus, OH (my first and, so far, only big city living experience) and revisited the beautiful Rocky Mountains by moving to Cortez and Dolores in Colorado (the “west slope” is still the “best slope in my opinion). I have had the privilege to gaze upon some of the most iconic cities in America, including New York City, Chicago, Austin, Washington D.C., Boston, and Denver (to name just a few). I have also explored some of America’s finest features – its immense wilderness areas. Not even counting state and regional parks, I have camped and hiked in thirteen of our countries national parks. I feel safe to say I have explored a good part of our nation.

However, my international endeavors are significantly more limited. I have visited five different countries in my life, but mostly in a superficial way. I traveled to Quebec in Canada with some friends for the 2015 FIFA Women’s World Cup and got to practice my French speaking skills with the Québécoise in Toronto and Quebec City. During my senior year of college, I got to live in the United Kingdom in Coleraine, Northern Ireland and study at Ulster University (still the country I know the best outside of my own). From there, fellow travelers and myself took trips to Dublin and London. To this day, I am still mad I never went over to Scotland, but I was also quite broke and even the cheap airfare across the pond was an expense I couldn’t swing. And if we’re being honest, I’m not sure I can really count Mexico, as that experience was literally just me swimming across the Rio Grande in Big Bend National Park, chilling on the Mexican shore for a few minutes, then swimming back across.

With all these experiences, I have yet to work outside of the country, nor have I ever spent more than a week anywhere that the majority of speakers didn’t know English. Of course, French is the official language of Quebec and Irish is the official language in Northern Ireland, but in both instances most of the population could speak English, so you didn’t really need to learn the language (though people were a whole lot nicer to you in Quebec City if you at least tried in French first).  So, this next planned adventure is going to be quite different.

As of now, my contract is to be an assistant language teacher (ALT) for one full year through my company. Link Interac Inc. is kind of like the private alternative to the JET program, the “Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme” that is sponsored by the Japanese government and is quite famous as a method of foreigners getting to live and work in Japan. While I applied to work at both, in the end I decided to go with the Interac job and am patiently awaiting further information on what this job will look like and where I will be exactly. Not only will I be working and living in about the farthest place from my home possible, but I must do so while working on another language, one with limited linguistic ties to my own.

I have had to learn a completely novel writing system from English and, despite a year’s worth of intensive study, I am still nowhere near fluent in the language. I have to prepare myself mentally and physically for what is likely the greatest challenge I have ever faced. But also, to finally explore and live in a place that has always been my top destination feels a bit like a dream.

My goal is to update this blog bi-monthly, aiming for the first and third Monday of each month. For these first few posts, I plan to simply recount the process of getting to Japan, what drove me to choose this destination above all others, and get myself (and hopefully you, my dear readers) excited for the journey. To steal another line from my fictional counterpart, “I’m going on an adventure!” And I can’t wait to share the experience with you.