Growing up, I won’t say I was bull-headed, but I think I could have easily been described as stubborn. I tended (and still do) to think that my opinion, whether it was well documented or not, was always clearly the right one.

I entered Gustavus as a first-year in the fall of 2013. I remember my dad telling me that I “had” to study abroad. As an incoming freshman, still anxious about living on my own in Minnesota for the next four years of my life, I thought that was maybe the stupidest thing I’d ever heard.

Eight months ago, I was told that my tray table needed to be folded up because my plane was landing in Osaka, Japan. I was planning to stay in a country I’d only heard and studied about, preparing to live with an anonymous, non-English speaking family, and doing it for the next four months of my life.

That’s not something I ever expected.

When you step off of a plane in a foreign country, you expect a lot. You expect everyone to look different and for the food to taste funny, but nothing can prepare you for seeing a vending machine selling hot cans of coffee, tea, and creamed corn, much less with Tommy Lee Jones’ face plastered across it.

For most of my life, people had referred to Japan as this technologically advanced place where robots run the country and everything is wired to be this amazing powerhouse of video game companies and electronics. There is nothing further from the truth. You’ll find those places in Tokyo, sure, but it’s not nearly as impressive as heated toilet seats or the convenience of a train that’s always on time.

“My experience in Japan was happiness personified by the person who was with me every step of the way.”

Something about Japan that people underestimate is the train system. Japanese trains can take you anywhere and everywhere, and they’re always on time. When I was in Japan, the trains were how I got to school, how I got home, and how I got around Japan. For example, every morning, I awoke close to 7:00 am, took a shower, ate breakfast next to my half-awake three-year old host-sister, and began my approximately one-hour commute to school. A brisk ten minute walk to the train station, five to ten minutes of waiting for the train while drinking a Tommy Lee Jones-endorsed coffee, 35 minutes standing and holding onto the grip above my head on said train, and another 15 minute zombie walk up a hill to my college. One Japanese student I met, made a five-hour commute from the other side of Japan, on a daily basis.

I went to school at Kansai Gaidai University, which is a school specifically meant for Japanese students to study abroad and for students from around the world who want to study in Japan. I usually had classes three times a day, and the classes ranged from courses on Japanese business, sexuality in Japan, or even Japanese film. The Japanese school system is different than in the United States. Their spring semester starts in April, so the campus was empty for most of my stay. However, upon the return of the Japanese students, the “ichinensei” or first-years, spend most of their time practicing their English with the English-speaking foreigners. If you’re not ready for it, it can be tiresome, but not only is it both helpful for learning Japanese, you’re teaching them English and it can be a very rewarding experience.

After my first week of school, I met someone that changed my life forever and we travelled everywhere together. We spent a week trip going to the Japanese Alps and exploring the cities around them. On a pretty regular basis, we would go to Kyoto and visit temples, we would go to a day-long festival in Nara, or sometimes we’d spend a weekend in a new town and just explore. We watched the cherry blossoms lose their petals while we drank convenience store wine underneath them. It’s hard to put finding someone like that into words or to explain what it’s meant for me as a person. Basically, my experience in Japan was happiness personified by the person who was with me every step of the way.

I think Japan can be described as a life-changing experience for me, but it seems as though the important things I learned were never particular to Japan: treat the people around you with respect, eating is something everybody has in common, etc. I didn’t learn about Japan so much as I learned that people everywhere are truly people, no matter how they look, how they talk, or where they live.

When you step off of a plane in a foreign country, you expect a lot. It’s almost impossible to expect you’ll change your life forever.