In the near future I’ll be traveling to Japan on vacation, and since it has been 3 years since my last trip (in 2015 which I documented here in great detail), I’m really looking forward to it.
While I am hoping this trip will generate some great content for this blog, those article(s) will take time and I’m not sure how detailed they will end up being. Even if I take a laptop I don’t foresee writing/posting and long articles from Japan.
So I’ve decided to do some (near) real-reporting of this trip on Twitter (find me at @selftaughtjapan) as well as Instagram (here). I’m pretty new to Instagram but I after some research it seems the best way to share travel photos. I’ll probably share the most photos on Instagram, a subset of them on Twitter, and then maybe an even smaller subset of those on this blog. So if you are interested, please consider following me on Twitter and/or Instagram.
When once asked what I want to do in Japan, because I am so language-focused I answered something to the effect that I wanted to speak to as many different people as possible in Japanese. But a trip where I am blabbing from morning to night (while surely helping reinforce some weak areas of my Japanese) would surely not be the best use of time. There is so much more to learn––culture, history, geography––and I’m hoping to experience as much as I can in Japan, of which language will only be a part.
Put another way, one of the themes of this blog is that just using the Internet you can get good exposure to many parts of spoken and written Japanese. That’s why when you actually go there, it makes more sense to see the sights than speak with random people in the streets (though that could be fun and rewarding in its own way)
Although I don’t want to give too many “spoilers”, I’ll just say I’ll be focusing on Tokyo and Hokkaido this time.
I still have mixed feelings about social media, but I think this will be one situation where they will really come in handy.
I hope some of you come along for the ride!
Fantastic! Have a great holiday!!