Tokyo

It seemed like a lifetime ago that I giddily and slightly apprehensively booked my holiday to Japan. 6 months have slipped away in the blink of an eye and in 4 short days I will be heading to Gatwick airport and starting my journey to Tokyo, via Istanbul. 

 

This is not only my first trip to Japan but also my first visit to Asia, a continent that has fascinated me for years. I am embarrassingly excited but also a little scared. I have booked everything independently, I am going on my own and I don't speak a word of Japanese. I am scared that I will be unable to do anything, that the language barrier will be impossible to get over and that I will get lonely doing this all alone. But there is a bigger part of me that is excited and exhilarated. I imagine myself staring wide eyes around a city that will quite simply blow my mind. I imagine meeting interesting people and going to magical places. Which one will turn out to be the reality we will soon find out. 

 

I hope that going on this big adventure will be good for me. I have let my confidence slip over the years, I used to be carefree and I travelled around the world without fear or trepidation. In the years since I let someone take the confidence from me, I let myself become unsure and skittish. This is my attempt to re-find myself. Am I nervous? Absolutely but I am also excited, inspired and proud that I have taken this step.

 

To be honest I haven't helped myself by leaving everything until the last moment. Unfortunately this is the person I am. I am terrible at planning and great at convincing myself I have all the time in the world when I don't. I haven't planned what I am going to do when I get to Tokyo. I want to see the sites and would like to visit Nico and Kyoto but I haven't planned anything. To be honest most of my thinking so far has revolved around eating Japan's world famous cuisine. I have been abroad before and have had everything planned and I have been abroad and winged it. Every time winging it had been better so I plan to take it easy and see when fate takes me.

 

Hopefully this post will be the start of my travel journal. If I have the time and the internet connection I will blog my experience as I go, if not then I guess I will have to share it all when I get back. Either way I cannot wait to share my experiences with all of you.

Image courtesy of GoBoiano