Introductions (See You in Under Two Weeks!)

While I still have about 12 days before joining the rest of the party in Japan, this felt like an appropriate time and place to both introduce myself to the blog and discuss some preparation steps in all of us meeting up together.

Hello! My name is Kaylyn, and this will be my fifth excursion to Japan. My first trip was while I was in college in 2006. I was desperate to get there the first time, and I had spent time as a lab rat doing medical research studies in order to fund a trip for a single week in the Tokyo area. I was deeply enamored, and returned again in 2008 to spend a semester there studying the language at KCP International Language School in Shinjuku, living just outside Tokyo in Mizonokuchi.

After a combination of both local San Antonio College language study and immersion study in Japan, I took the first of five levels of the Japanese Language Proficiency Test and received a certificate for the first level of fluency. The test is very expensive, and you have to travel to one of the very few spots in the country where they hold the tests, so I have not taken subsequent tests! I am confident I could pass the next level, and am a little unsure whether I would finish the middle level. I know I wouldn't pass the top two! Those top levels would qualify you for either translation or business jobs. So I guess my language skills have remained stuck at about a conversational level. For the sake of subsequent trips, I suppose that's good enough, though I always wish I could make some dedicated time for more immersive learning experiences.

I took another trip with a group of friends in 2010, and finally took my most recent trip with my husband Josh and two other friends in 2015. I am always excited when other people I know seem to genuinely want to make the trip. For years I would often get frustrated when friends would talk a big game and say we should all plan to go together, but then nobody would actually make the effort to do it.

It should be noted that every time I have made trips to Japan, it has been while squeaking by on the absolute bare minimum, financially. The first clue was, of course, me telling you that I participated in medical research studies in order to fund my first trip in 2006, because working minimum wage retail while going to college wasn't gonna net me the funds necessary to do it. While I was in school in 2008, I immediately lost my wallet and passport and had to scrape by on bits of snacks whenever I could find them for a couple weeks until my parents could help me secure money again and my bank could ship me a new debit card overseas. The other trips were just as much a performance of scooping every penny I could into savings just to be able to buy plane tickets and make hotel reservations, then choosing to spend as little money on literally anything else while there aside from food and transportation. This upcoming trip is no exception.

That having been said, this might be the most prepared I've been for one of these trips in quite a long time. Almost everything we're planning to do has been paid for before Josh and I get there, mostly due to the fact that it has become easier than ever to apply for pay-in-four style payment plans, even with bad credit. Flights were largely paid for probably about four years ago now (a sad fact as highlighted by Stacy's recent blog entry about how this trip was supposed to happen in 2020 rather than 2023, but you all know what sorts of things happened in 2023). The hotel has been covered by one of these payment plans. Trips to places like Tokyo DisneySea and the Yokohama Gundam were all paid plenty in advance. It felt like, whenever I got paid, if I could smack down one of these little side things we needed, I could slowly chip away at making this thing a reality. We unfortunately won't have a lot of spending cash, but just being there at all and being with people we care about is the part that honestly matters the most.

The unfortunate part is that the reason we aren't already there right now is because Josh and I simply live extremely unpredictable lives, and our working conditions have just never been as stable and secure as we would like. Our situation has been known to flip-flop between the two of us, but at this point in time he has a full-time job with decent enough benefits, while I lost my full-time employment earlier this year and have been picking up freelance work wherever I can. It has been getting us by, but it's not good enough for us to be able to be away from our work for more than maybe a week and a half in one stretch of time. Sadly, it meant we had to cut the leg of the trip that included areas such as Kyoto, Osaka, and Nara. For me, it perhaps wasn't as big a loss as I have been to Osaka and Kyoto before in the past, but I regret that Josh won't be able to see it, as it's someplace he's never been to before at all. But maybe one day we will make an effort to do that part of the trip all on its own. We'll turn it into something for us to look forward to together.

Josh and I will be meeting up with Stacy and friends in Tokyo in a little under two weeks. It's an area I've spent a lot of time in, but I could also stay there forever and never get bored. It's hard to run out of things to do in the most populated city on the planet, and even short excursions outside the city offer a plethora of interesting things to see and do. This may be the first time I have left for Japan via LAX, meaning no layovers in other cities. I can't say I think Los Angeles International is a fun airport to hang out in, or even to get down to at all, but the shorter travel time in the air than previous trips from Texas will be a relief.

There's just a few dangling details left, and even if we left without doing them we'd probably be pretty good to go. I kinda wanna get my hair trimmed and dyed before heading off. We're going to meet our pet sitter to introduce her to our cats in a little over a week, and I hope that goes well and that the little ladies end up liking her. I might even want to grab some compression socks if only for the flights, as I have found my legs don't seem to have great circulation after sitting for a long time, and that's without even being up in the atmosphere.

As I sit here at my desk writing, I'm looking at other little things I've prepared that I'm glad I took care of early. I found a good Japanese washcloth for hand drying, which is a big necessity since a lot of public restrooms don't have paper towels or hand dryers. Meanwhile, the Tokyo region recently stopped selling normal everyday Suica and Pasmo transit cards as they've had an IC chip shortage. There are other options for convenient IC cards you can get in other ways, but since I knew there were plans to stop selling these cards, I'd made an effort to order ones for Josh and me from a travel agent before it was too late. Really glad I got to them before they became impossible to find. Under normal circumstances, you'd just buy them straight from the kiosks at the train stations, but by the time we're there, the cards won't be there anymore. Additionally, I've prepared a couple hats and gloves, because while it should only be so cold, I seem to have a pretty big issue with even cool temperatures, and I get sick from being even mildly chilly pretty quickly. I also ordered a stack of business cards with English on one side and Japanese on the other and bought a cool business card case to carry them in, just in case there's some random moment where that could even remotely become handy to have on me. There's all kinds of electronics that will need to be charged, and I've ordered a power bank that had good reviews that should be arriving at my door by tomorrow. At this point, aside from packing our bags, I feel like we're pretty prepared to get moving on this trip.

I am more restless as time gets closer, but really, that's just the excitement talking. Josh and I have perhaps well over-planned for a couple of days worth of things to do, which I'll address at a later, more appropriate time. Until then, I will leave it to the other authors who are already on the move to tell you about their happenings in south-central Japan. (Also, Stacy, this probably isn't useful to you anymore, but don't worry, this writing on the road simply reads "limousine"!)

Thank you, Stacy, for inviting us to write about our journeys alongside you. Looking forward to sharing more with you all in the future!

(A brief edit: I would love to tag this as a Japan blog, but it seems like I can't add tags to my blogs! I can see "Japan" as a selectable tag that's already been created by another author, but it's just not clickable at all! I'll see if this can be fixed later.)

(Edit 2: Good news! I don't know why I couldn't add tags on desktop, but it didn't fight me on mobile! This article is now correctly tagged as "Japan".)