Four months is quite a long time to go without writing some sort of update, but to my credit, it has been a very pear-shaped third of a year. I will first dive into the shockingly bad bits, and then move on to the surprisingly good bits that have precipitated out of the quagmire in which I've found myself recently.
To begin with, this is being written from my home office in America. It follows, being that I sadly lack any appendage capable of spanning the Pacific, that I am also in America, and that things in Japan went horribly wrong. Indeed they did, but not for reasons that I, or anyone else, could have really anticipated. Effective as of November, I was forced to withdraw from the Waseda study abroad program, primarily on account of my somehow catching pneumonia.
It has hard to describe in any sort of tangible fashion the utter sense of loss and disappointment that I felt over this. Seeing three years' worth of preparation get flushed down the toilet didn't exactly make for the best Christmas that I've ever had. It's certainly taken all of four months to get back on my feet again, not just physically, but mentally and emotionally as well.
So, that ends the ugly bits. Or at least, the ugly bits I'm willing to divulge publicly. Now it's time for the good news: This is actually going to work out better in the long run.
Wait... what?
First, now that I'm not forced to take a large portion of my classes in English, I've been able to focus much more heavily on my language studies. My scholarships covered all of the expenses that I incurred while studying in Japan, which means that my remaining savings can be applied to doing all the travel that I was hoping to accomplish... er, sometime.
So, I leave in less than a month for Taiwan and Korea, after which I'll be going back to Japan for a month or two. Thankfully, Professor Masuyama, my Japanese instructor back at CSUS, has been very understanding about the whole situation, and so she's managed to put a package together that will allow me to complete my second bachelors' degree in Japanese while I'm doing all this traveling. Plus, I should still have enough dosh remaining at the end of the semester to fund my way across Europe.
The icing on the cake is that the friends I made, both at Waseda, and in the NSEP Boren program have made all of this possible. I'd love to name everybody here, but that's an awful lot of work, so all I can say is that I'm really grateful for all the people who supported me.
So, overall, things have worked out better. I'm not broke, not dead, and I'll get to see a lot more of the world than I originally planned.
Oh, and I have less than a month to learn Korean. But that's a subject for the next post.
Life is shaky and rough, but still good.
