Author: Teddy McCormick

Well, Florida is still Florida. The air is so humid walking around feels like swimming, the cars are still too big to fit in the massive parking spaces, and there’s still lingering damage from the last hurricane as it heads into the next hurricane season.

We’re setting out tomorrow for a few weeks in Florida! I don’t normally mince words about my opinion of Florida, so you probably know I’m not terribly excited about it, but I am looking forward to seeing friends and family there.

I have this problem where when I start reading a book, I can’t really stop until it’s over or else I don’t pick it back up again. Some books are easier to return to than others, but in general if more than a day passes after setting it down, I’m not gonna finish it.

So I had a fun Mother’s Day.

The funeral stuff was a lot; Cassie may do a post getting into the specifics more later, but I’m not going to pressure her to do it if she doesn’t feel up to it. But it’s over now, so things are settling down to… well, not normal, but that’s mostly because normal isn’t a thing…

Boy, we knew Los Angeles was having a bit of a cool spell, but we didn’t expect Virginia to be this much hotter. Still, it’s nice to be back with family, even if it is for a funeral.

So I’ve realized that part of why I’ve been posting less has been that I view fewer of the things in my life as eventful or noteworthy. Problem is, I made this blog so people can see what I’m up to, not just see the most interesting things I do.

Okay, so our departure from Japan was a bit of a whirlwind. But the good kind! I don’t want to bury the lede, so let me open by saying: we have a path to a visa!

Whoops lol. So turns out getting Vietnam visas takes longer than we thought. Luckily it’s an easy pivot to do South Korea again – we were already going to be there for an overnight layover, so we’ve got a hotel our first night and we’ll actually be on the same flight!

It’s been sad saying goodbye to all of our friends here, especially since we don’t want to leave and don’t know when we’ll be coming back. But the sadness is also wonderful, because it’s only so sad thanks to how many close friendships we’ve made!

The short version is our visas are running out soon – March 19th – and we have no real leads on how to extend them. The longer version isn’t much longer.

Another photo dump! Not a massive one but it’s been a minute.

Cassie and I have both obviously been studying Japanese since before we left the States, and it has not been a fast or an easy process. But the more we come to understand Japanese, the more I think the hardest part about Japanese isn’t anything about Japanese – it’s just how different it is from…

I don’t normally like posts apologizing for not posting, but uh, it’s been a minute, so I am sorry to anyone who’s been wondering how we’re doing. We’re doing great! We’re just, like, settled in now.

I am writing this from our Airbnb in Hakodate! A bit later than we’d planned, but at least we’re here now.

We’re currently packing for South Korea tomorrow! It’s funny how weird it feels to be going to another country – we’ve been traveling a lot in a foreign country up until now, but this is a new foreign country, and it’s strange to think we’ll be in a whole different place tomorrow night.

We’ve picked a path! We’re finishing out this visa in Sapporo, the big city on Hokkaido, and then spending a week in Seoul before coming back.

We’re nearing the end of our tourist visa (about two weeks), so it’s time to reflect on everything we’ve seen, and time to start figuring out what comes next.

If you’re wondering why there haven’t been any posts while we were in Osaka, it’s because we didn’t do anything while we were in Osaka. Cassie hasn’t been feeling well, and we didn’t have any specific plans in mind anyway, so we just chilled.

Here it is, as promised!

The McFarlands (and PJ, Lizzy’s sister) are here, and we’ve had a great time traveling around Tokyo with them, showing them some of the stuff we’ve enjoyed. I guess before I get to that, though, I should talk some more about our week before they got here. It wasn’t very eventful, but we did do…

We haven’t had nearly as eventful a time as our friends and family back in Florida, but we do have a few updates!

Ready for it?

It’s funny; we spent almost as much time in Kyoto as we had in Tokyo, but we all agreed that coming back to Tokyo felt like coming home again. It’s a nice neighborhood and a comfortable place!

So first things first: I should warn you to expect lighter updates for the next week. We’re traveling in Kyoto and I didn’t take my laptop, so all posts until we’re back in Tokyo are going to be written on my phone.

Our time in Los Angeles may have been dominated by sitting around the house sick, but that just meant that our final weekend, when we were finally healthy, had a lot of stuff we needed to cram into it!

California has been lovely, but also not exactly what we were expecting from it. This is, in no small part, thanks to a fun little merry-go-round of COVID that we’ve been riding at the McFarlands’ house, which means we’ve not done very much during our time here.

It’s time. We had a fantastic time in Virginia seeing all our friends and family here, but today’s the day we say goodbye to everyone. Thank you to everyone here for making our time so great, and an extra big thanks to Candace and Tim for hosting us and for taking care of our cats!…

We’ve been having a lot of fun seeing all of our friends and family in the area, so I thought it’d be fun to tell you all about some of it!

We’re fairly settled in now in Candace and Tim’s basement, where we’ll be for most of the next month, so really, it’s past time for another update on where we’re at and what we’ve been up to!

The day has come! If you’re reading this, we’ve left the state. (This post is scheduled to go live after our flight has taken off.) We land today in VA, where we’ll be for the next month and change.

We have our tickets bought! Which is exciting, but made me realize it’s worth going into a little more detail about our pre-Japan plans, and when we’ll be where. So here are the actual dates!

There are a lot of questions that we keep getting asked about our move to Japan, so we figured you might like to see the whole list! We’ll keep updating this list as questions keep coming up.

This is (going to be) our blog! We don’t promise to be particularly punctual about updating it, but since we don’t really do Facebook or social media of any kind, it seemed like a good way to keep in touch with people, and let everyone know what we’ve been up to.