Leaving is easier when you have a return ticket.

You leave anyway, obviously, but somehow it helps to know that in x months you are going to go back home. When you feel homesick you can look at the calendar and count the days until you can see your family and friends again. When you leave without knowing when you will return, you lose that supporting comfort and even if you know you're going back someday, it's like it'll never come.

This is from the person who has just left, so I don't even want to know how I'll be in two months, when it's Christmas and I'm here alone.

My home city's airport sucks balls and flights to anywhere are not only rare and far between, but also way too expensive, so I had to take a bus for six long hours to get to an airport that's actually useful and not a waste of money and space. Six hours napping and unsuccessfully trying to find a comfortable position on my seat. The silver lining is that it left me at the airport just half an hour before the check-in counter was opened, so I didn't have to wait a lot before I got rid of my very big luggage.

Now, if you've ever taken a plane you will know that the worst seat is the middle seat. Aisle seat, okay. Window seat, okay. Middle seat is most definitely not okay. And I had the middle seat not only in one flight, but in the two of them. Then again, sometimes fortune is in your side, and it turns out no one's on the seat right next to you because it's not summer and people are not travelling as much, so you can stretch out a bit and sleep comfortably at last. I closed my eyes as the plane took off and opened just on time for an inflight snack!

I had thought a two hours stop would be long and boring, but escandinavian airports have horrible designs that make absolutely no sense and force you to take forever to get to somewhere that was apparently close when you checked the map, especially because there seems to be people enough to make up the entire population of a not so small country. Then agian, they also had free unlimited wifi in the whole airport, so they have their good sides.

By the way, remember how I told you I had the middle seat in both flights? For the Helsinki-Nagoya flight I had the middle sit of the middle row of seats, if it can get any worse (it can't). But this time not only the seat to my left was empty, but also the one to my right. So basically I had three seats all to myself! I could lay down comfortably and sleep... If only I could sleep, because after six hours of bus and three or four of plane to nap, I was wide awake. Damn!

At least there was a decent selection of movies to choose from, and I decided to start with How to Train Your Dragon 2. Now, this is an animated movie. Some would say a children's movie (I call bullshit, though). I was enjoying this beautiful movie when dinner was served, and then suddenly the flight attendant came back to my seat and worriedly bent towards me... To ask me if I was travelling alone.

I almost threw my passport to her head. I didn't because I'm nice and polite, but I wanted to. Plenty of adults watch Pixar movies, and anyway, even if I had been a minor travelling alone, maybe during the middle of a flight to the other side of the world would have been a bad time to realize it. Not much you can do when we are flying somewhere over Russia anyway. Blehrg, stupid people.

So between movies and movies (I watched The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug and it's horrible and I hate it) I met a very nice Spanish family who was living in Germany (the kids spoke the weirdest mix of Spanish and German) and was travelling to Nagoya because they used to live there some years ago. We talked for a bit and then I napped some and started and finished a 368 pages book.

But details apart, the most important advice I can give you after this is the following: don't speak English when you travel abroad. Try to speak the national language, and butcher it so much that no one can figure out what the hell you are saying. Confuse them. And then they will get tired of trying to understand you and they will let you through customs even if you can't provide any address, contact or return ticket.

My boss came to pick me up at the airport. She's very nice and drove me to the school in her car. The rest of the day I watched some of the classes, met the teachers and the staff and was informed about a lot of things that I can no longer remember. The children are all adorable and tiny, and they speak English so well it's amazing. A Japanese 12 years old girl told me about the Cold War in English... I don't think I knew what the Cold War was when I was 12, and I definitely couldn't explain it in English. Even the 4 and 5 year olds can read quite long texts. They were all very happy to talk to me and ask me things about Spain.

The teachers are also quite nice, and from all over the world: Sri Lanka, Japan, Romania, the USA, the UK... and a Mexican guy, a Peruvian guy and then the Romanian one speaks some Spanish too. We are going to conquer the school and teach Spanish instead, you just wait and see.

Other than that, jet lag sucks, Yesterday I went to sleep at 9pm and today I woke up around 7am. I spent my day getting curtains, sheets and other necessities, and watching Project Runaway because suddenly I'm really invested in a reality show about fashion designers. Japan is changing me already.

A typhoon is coming, so I'll just leave you wondering if I'll survive it or not.