On Being A Fraud

I’m not exactly an adherent to all things Ireland. I despise our deeply embedded culture of alcoholism, I’m not proud of our State’s relationship with the Church, and I’ve never embraced education of the Irish language. I don’t listen to Traditional music, I grew up with an unexplainable hatred of Michael Flatley, and I feel unclean just walking past Carroll’s, the infamous peddler of tacky “Irish” souvenirs. I never even learned the rules of any of the Gaelic games. Yet I love my country. For all it’s flaws, for all it’s culture that I fail to identify with, I’m proud of where I’m from.

Now, a strange thing happens to a person living away from home.

Operation Make A Plan

So I did it! I made it! One year in Japan, now officially under my belt. One year since I arrived into the Tokyo heat and ventured forth to unknown lands of Yamagata. It`s been a heck of year. And now would be the perfect time to do a retrospective.

Except that I`m not going to. I ain`t got time to sit around and talk about the past. Tomorrow I`m off to China for a three week solo trip around the sunny South-East. At least, that`s where I think I`m going… I haven`t exactly planned very much yet. So what better way to kill two jobs with one blog post than to write an update about my plan, as I make my plan! It`s foolproof!

Force of Nature

In March, I decided to take a short road trip from my home on the west coast of northern Japan to the east coast. Over there lies Sendai, the Tohoku region’s main city. If that name sounds somehow familiar, it became newsworthy last year when its industrialised port was slammed by a tsunami, providing the world with images of black smoke billowing from a blazing petroleum refinery.

Photographic Memories

Phew! Okay, bit of a hiatus, but we’re back. Busy before the Christmas break, busy after the Christmas break... but things have calmed down now, so let’s kick off the new year (while it’s still... wait, February!? Oh man...) with a post, shall we?

Before I hopped on a plane to Vancouver to eat stupid amounts of food with my brother and sister, I left behind the snowy mountains of Tsuruoka for the skyscrapers of Tokyo. I’d been there before in July for the JET orientation, and I’d had a good time taking in the city with some of my fellow Irish. But at heart, I am a massive loner and I enjoy few things more than traipsing around somewhere entirely unfamiliar, exploring it by myself. At orientation, after a meeting with the Irish Embassy staff (in an Irish pub. Keepin’ it classy lads) I took a detour on my way back to the hotel. It ended up being the best 3 hours I spent in the city.

Hiking Like A Boss

For whatever reason, writing this update was really difficult. Not that I hit an emotional point or anything, just that every time I sat down to try and type it up, I didn’t know what way I wanted to do it. I could either do it written, using words and whatnot, or do it as a slideshow, using pictures I’ve taken. Then again, I could do both. Write up a few nice sentences, then show you the pictures. Or, if it doesn’t detract too much from the descriptive writing, pepper the entire post with photos as they are called for.

Quiet Weekend

A bit of down time was in order. I’d been getting ready for my first classes, studying this new language and I needed to prepare for my introduction speech to the school on Monday, which was to be in Japanese. This weekend I would only be making an appearance at a local festival where some new friends would be performing with their Taiko drumming group. Afterwards there was to be some kind of party with food which I had already committed to. Other than that, I had two days to myself. Two days where I would hole up in my apartment and just relax and get a bit of last minute work done. A nice, comfortable, quiet weekend.

Signing On

If it's all the same to you, I would like to open my blog with a welcome and a disclaimer.

Firstly, hello. Thanks for reading my blog.

Now that that’s out of the way, I’m going to take a moment to apologise in advance for the posts that will follow over the next year or so. I have no clear format in mind for this blog, no update schedule, and no fixed writing style. Sometimes my posts may be brief, diary-like entries accompanied by a (incredibly amateur) photo and sometimes they may be closer in style to a short story, or a poem, or pretty much whatever else I’m in the mood for at the time. There may be long stretches where I neglect to write anything at all. Although I’ll try to keep my writing accessible to everyone, I cannot guarantee that I will be able to resist including the occasional in-joke or reference that only one or two of my readers may get. In short, this blog will almost certainly be a messy, unreadable, stagnant corner of the internet.












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