So I Went to Japan for Spring Break…

japan post

Oh hey. Yeah I went to Japan for Spring Break and basically planned it in less than five days. I wanna show you.

Listen & Read:

“Girls Gone Wild” by BananaLemon

“Bad Girls” by M.I.A.

“All the Stars” by Kendrick Lamar, SZA

Well technically, I’ve planned it for eight months. But also five days? I’ll explain.

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When I studied abroad, there were several people that I knew from my school and my previous internship that were also studying abroad. Over the year that we were all in our separate places, we bonded in the common issues among us kids studying abroad. It was only a few weeks before I was planning to travel to see my friends in Germany, London, and… Japan. One is nottttt like the other. If you can recall, I studied in Switzerland. Nonetheless, I saved up my money towards my trips. It costs about $100 for a four hour train to Marburg, and $60 for a flight to London. Japan… was another… thing. If you were lucky, you could find a flight for almost $700, which… honestly isn’t bad for a 14 hour flight. It just so happened that the prices were low around the time that we were both totally and completely free.

But, nothing is that easy.

You see, my parents barely wanted me to study abroad in the first place. Why would they let me fly even more across the world? So, after months of trying to work with them, the golden time of good prices passed. However, my friend and I did not give up.

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Several hopes and dreams lifted and crushed later, I was back in Switzerland after Christmas break. And this time, I meant business! And by business I meant my own business– without my parents. I decided to go for it without asking to go through my parents. Instead, I would tell them that this is what I am going to do. (which normally is like not… a way to speak to your parents? but determination got the best of me) It took two months of open Google Flight tabs in the middle of class. Then, I remember it was a Thursday, I checked Google Flights again and the prices went down. Spring break, for me, was coming up in a couple of days. This was the same time that my friend would be having her first week of classes. Not necessarily perfect scheduling, but… we wouldn’t rest until I got those tickets.

But wait. Another road block stopped us. Did you know that you can no longer buy plane tickets with cash? I for one did not have a Swiss bank account, so … yeah. But I didn’t give up. I had a friend who had just recently asked me if I could sign her into class because she was too sick to come. Why not ask for a favor that is completely too big of a favor in comparison to her small ask of writing her initials? After some explanation, she agreed to buy the tickets for me with her card while I give her the money in cash. We met up after class, and she gave me a pep talk as a sketchy ticket website stared at us through a laptop on her bed.

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“What do you want to listen to?” I ask in shock as she offered to make me dinner since I just spent a lot of money on tickets from Zurich ⇒ London ⇒ Tokyo.

“Play something that says– ‘I just bought a flight to Tokyo’.”

And in less than five days, I was sleepy-drunk in a sushi bar at 3 AM.

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In all honesty, I did not think I would end up in Japan. I thought the soonest I would live under the record breaking Japanese sun would be during the summer Olympics in 2020. But then… I ended up staring at the gray ceiling of the coolest hostel I’ve ever been in. If you want to see more of what I did, and what I bought, in Japan, I’ll link my (low quality) films below.

Moral of this story: never! give! up!