I am moving to Japan in 10 days!

Hi Guys! So yes, it’s official: I am moving to Japan for at least a year! Here’s how this happened:

My new home in Ibaraki, Japan!

I’ve been pretty involved with teaching stuff in college. I tutored a few times a week, taught SAT classes over the summer a few times, and even directed a little bit of student theatre on campus.  I also had this amazing, amazing semester abroad in Paris last year, during which I was fortunate enough to travel to sixteen different countries and experience all kinds of things that I’d never even known existed before. Soo, when I was applying to jobs for after college, I decided to look for programs that would allow me to teach English abroad, and do two things that I love at once.

I was a “Comparative Literature and Society” major in college, which basically means that I took a bunch of different language, literature and culture classes and tried to synthesize them all into a giant research paper at the end of four years. My major language was French, but since I’m also really interested in Japan, my major allowed me to take a few classes in the Japanese department as well. I took a class on Japanese History, and, just this year, finally got to start learning Japanese. (It actually might be the coolest language ever …I should also mention that I’m also sort of an amateur linguistics nerd.)

Anyway, the combination of all these interests led me to the Japan Exchange and Teaching Program, this great program through the Japanese government that sends over 4,000 English-speakers to Japan every year to teach English in Japanese middle and high schools. The application process was super intense, took a full school year, and included a 2-page essay and an interview at the Japanese Consulate. On my very last day of college classes, I heard that I had been accepted, and now I can’t believe that I’m flying over there in exactly 10 DAYS!  I'm going to be teaching English at a few different high schools in the suburbs of Tokyo, and I'll be team-teaching which Japanese teachers, which means that I'll (hopefully) also learn some Japanese! I'll use this blog over the next year to keep in touch with people from home and share stories about all the craziness and excitement that comes with living and working in a foreign country. Look out for details about my new home (and possibly my packing list) in the posts to come, and get ready to hear all about my adventures in Japan!