2 Comments
I realized recently that one of the things I love about Japan is how easy it can be to have a great day. Some of my other favourite times in Japan have been days that I just spend sitting down by Kobe harbour enjoying the ocean air and the sun and people watching. This Saturday I woke up late, realized it was a beautiful day, and decided to head into Osaka where I could just wander for hours, shopping, eating street food, playing in the arcade, and sipping on Starbucks. I love that those days in Japan aren't any less valuable to me than the ones where I go further away and celebrate special festivals or visit interesting landmarks.
The next few weeks will be no less eventful for me, with a long weekend coming up in South Korea, and a hike to the top of Mount Fuji the weekend after. I have 51 days left in Japan, which means 51 more adventures ahead!
Once I started work last week, everything changed. My ramen diet turned into lunches and dinners out pretty much every day, and bentos, beef rice bowls and sashimi have become part of regular life. Working has been fun so far, with my time split into mornings of marketing work and afternoons of research. The topics are interesting, the people are wonderful, I get to use diverse skill sets, and I was given a relatively high amount of responsibility without much supervision from the beginning. That might also be because my supervisor left for a 2 week work trip on my 2nd and 3rd weeks of work, and after being here for a week, he'll be gone for another 3 weeks, so my work is pretty much entirely self-driven. Now that my second work week is coming to an end, I think it's safe to say I've fallen into a comfortable routine, still having enough freedom to see and do new things. When my friend Jordan gets here this weekend I'll be going on my first excursion outside of Kobe to visit Kyoto. Looks like my next adventure will be learning how to take the train! I'll let you know how that goes...
A year ago, I ended a major chapter of my story. The setting was Nepal, the characters were my INDEV friends, and you all seemed to enjoy following the plot. Now, I have a new story to tell, and since the last one was so well received, I thought I'd share this one with whoever cares to read it. Since my last post, I've finished 2 semesters of my Master of Global Affairs program at the Munk School of Global Affairs within the University of Toronto, and I have another 2 terms starting in September. I said in my last post that I'd write again when I have something to say. It's not that my life's been boring for the last year, it's just been awesome in a more nerdy academic kind of way. Now that I'm in Japan and starting on my next adventure, here's hoping the excitement begins again.
It's been 4 days now since a massive 7.8 magnitude earthquake decimated Kathmandu, my latest home away from home, and it's taken me until now to post about it because somehow I just couldn't find the right words. When I wrote this draft I was somewhere between Winnipeg and Saskatoon and my airplane screen said I had 10 hours until landing, so I had plenty of time to hammer out my thoughts and feelings. Here's what I came up with...
I've been counting down the days to coming home since I left in September. We started with months, which turned into weeks, then days, and then hours. Now we're home. The Nepal group arrived in Toronto safe and sound last night, to a cluster of anxiously waiting parents, siblings, and flowers. Nothing in the world could have felt better than my family's hugs, my dad's cooking, and my comfy bed. The 15 minutes it took for our baggage to get to the carousel after we landed in Toronto's airport felt like an eternity!
The actual journey home was mostly uneventful, we left Kathmandu around 9pm local time, for a 5 hour flight to Doha, Qatar. There, I had a 9 hour layover, which entitled me to a visa out of the airport and a hotel room, but since it was already midnight and things were closed, we didn't bother leaving the hotel to explore the city. By 6:30am we were back at the airport, and after an hour and a half delay, we had a 13 hour flight to Montreal. After clearing customs and a quick transfer we were on another flight: destination HOME! Total travel time was just over 30 hours. During my last few days in Nepal, I had a number of goodbye celebrations. My work held a special lunch for me on Tuesday where they served special Nepali food and gave me a gift of a fair trade bag and said some very kind words. It came up during lunch that my supervisor had wanted to learn how to make the snowflakes I had taught to children at the Christmas fair earlier this year, but she had always thought she'd have more time to ask me. So, after lunch, the whole office came down to my table and spent an hour learning how to make snowflakes. We came out with one giant snowflake that everyone made a small piece of, and it now hangs in the entrance of the FTG office. I was still never really upset to be leaving Nepal, but if there was ever a moment that I was a little sad, that was it. It was the perfect goodbye. We had another lunch on Wednesday with CECI, the organization that hosts Canadian volunteers where more kind words were shared and we thanked everyone for the support they had given us. Now that I'm home I'm not sure I'll have much else to write about. I have two weeks of debrief in Waterloo and then I'm finished my undergraduate degree. I'll hopefully work a summer job in the city, and in September I'll start my Master of Global Affairs at the Munk School of Global Affairs, part of the University of Toronto. The degree is 2 years long, and the summer in between is spent on a 4-month co-op. Most people go abroad to work, so hopefully I'll have another adventure to write about. Until then, I'll say goodbye (although I might still write when I have something to say) and thank you to everyone who's been following me on my journey. Every night at 11:40 I can hear from my room the low rumble of an airplane overhead. This has been happening since we arrived in September, but it quickly became the sort of thing that was easy to ignore, and I stopped noticing the sound all together within the first week. Now, I hear the airplane again, every night at 11:40, like clockwork. It has started to serve as a reminder that another day has passed, and that we are another day closer to home. In exactly 9 days I will be on that very flight, and my neighbours will hear me pass above them as I depart this country one last time. I was warned that when it came time to leave Nepal, my emotions would be mixed. Maybe it hasn't quite set in yet, but the sadness of leaving Nepal in just over two weeks still hasn't surfaced on my emotional radar. So far it's all just been varying degrees of happiness.
This weekend was the Nepali New Year. Happy 2071 by the way! Like many festivals in Nepal, this celebration is mostly done within the family home. There is no countdown to midnight ("Tin, Dui, Ek...Happy New Year" just doesn't sound right to me), so we decided to take the three day weekend to celebrate in our own way. Rasha, Darrelle and I went to Chitwan National Park, another major tourist area of Nepal where people often go on safari. While there, we took a canoe trip down the river that surrounds the park, visited the elephant breeding and training centre, and rode an elephant on a jungle safari. We were able to see a rhino taking a bath from only a few yards away, two different types of crocodiles only a few feet from our canoe, countless elephants of all ages, and various exotic birds and deer. Unfortunately, the elephant we rode was highly flatulent, but she was considerate enough to swat at the air with her tail each time to waft the smell away. I have to say, I never expected to ride a gassy elephant or learn what to do in case I'm being chased by a rhino (thankfully I didn't have to use this wisdom, and hopefully I won't ever have to), but I suppose I can add these to my collection of experiences I would never have had if it weren't for Nepal. I think my collection of experiences is big enough for now though. Canada, I'm ready for you. Photos of Pokhara and Chitwan are coming soon.
So much has happened since my last post, I don't even know where to begin! First of all, my countdown is at 35 days now which is ridiculously soon, and my sense from the others is that we're all a bit emotionally conflicted (although I'm about an oceans worth of happy with a raindrops worth of sad...so not too conflicted). By far the most important thing that has happened recently is that I figured out how to get the shower to have BOTH heat and pressure. It took me an entire 6 months, and it's hot enough outside now that I kind of prefer the cool showers, but I figured it out and am very proud! Other than my glorious showering adventures, I went exploring in Bali for a week at the end of February/beginning of March and participated in the Hindu festival of Holi.
Overall, I've had a great month here and with the weather getting nicer by the day, I'm counting on having another outstanding month to end this placement with a bang!
During my first few weeks in Nepal, I wrote a blog about my visit to New Sadle, the handicraft production house and rehabilitation centre for people living with leprosy and polio. Since then, I've been waiting for another experience that impacts me as much as that one did, but everything seems to have fallen short. Perhaps this is because New Sadle was my first time witnessing development work 'on the ground' or maybe it was just because the people I met there were truly the most inspirational I'll ever meet. Unfortunately, in the months that followed this visit, I started to lose the passion for development work that had been so tremendously fuelled by New Sadle. In the last few weeks, I've been stoking and rekindling that fire by visiting other fair trade member organizations and photographing their products for the catalogue. Last week was the first time since my New Sadle experience that I visited an actual production house, and while it didn't have quite the same impact on me, I saw and learned a ton of new and cool things!
Time is FLYING! I've been back in Nepal for 3 weeks already, and the countdown has officially dropped to double digits. As I write this, I have exactly 91 days, 10 hours and 16 minutes until take off, although my experience with the Kathmandu airport has taught me to expect an extra 3 hours at least. My time back in the country has been really interesting so far. I find myself noticing things now that I had previously overlooked, or had noticed before but not really absorbed. For example:
|