On November 8th, 2019 Joanna and I had our wedding. It was great, people had a good time, I was relieved the wedding planning was over. For those of you that have had to plan a wedding, I’m sure you can relate to the stress of it all.

I only managed to get about 2 hours of sleep last night due to jet lag. Woke up still not believing that we’re in Japan, one of our favorite places in the world. I usually have nothing hard scheduled for the first day of a trip, we’ll stay close to where our hotel/airbnb/hostel is and wander around to find things to eat, take a nap, and then eat some more. Today was no exception 🙂

Last summer, I decided to enroll myself in a online beginners Japanese course through the University of Minnesota. This was my 3rd attempt at learning because I’m a terrible self learner and I need the threat of public humiliation as a motivator for success. This is also how I managed to get through grad school for 3 years.

The last two days in Fukuoka have been largely unstructured just so we could ease into the time change and the long list of activities we have planned for the next few weeks. As a result, our sleep has been kind of all over the place but TODAY we have places to be and stuff to do. I knew that I wanted to bring Joanna to one of the two peace museums either in Hiroshima or Nagasaki. Being in Fukuoka we’re about an hour from either city. Selfishly, I made the executive decision to just go back to Hiroshima because I wanted to eat Hiroshima style okonomiyaki again.

Woke up yesterday morning with rain outside our window. It looks like most of southern Japan was going to get showers the next few days which made it perfect timing for us to leave for the next place. A few years ago, my friend Luke recommended a place called Yakushima Island for my next Japan trip as it’s a designated world heritage site due to having Japanese cedar forests with trees that are several thousand years old.