30 Day Challenge: Best trip of your life (How I met my girlfriend)

In my second year of high school I got a chance to go to Japan for a short (three weeks) student exchange. The possibility to go to Japan was one of the two reasons for my high school choice. (The other reason was the music program.) Every year, two people were chosen for this short exchange in an all-girl high school in Osaka. I still kind of find it hard to believe I was picked. Luck was on my side, and the choice was mostly based on written applications. I tend to be much more convincing on paper than in person.

And that's how I met my girlfriend, Rita. It's been, what, almost ten years now.

It's kind of baffling to think that we probably never would've talked if we hadn't been the two people chosen for this trip. I knew of her, but I'm pretty bad at making friends spontaneously, and I wouldn't have had a reason to talk to her without this. According to me the first time we met was at the info for the Japan exchange, before we applied. We happened to sit close by and I started talking to her and we talked almost the entire half an hour about anime and Japanese culture. But it kind of doesn't count because afterwards she had no memory of talking to me. So, if we hadn't been chosen together we most likely never would've talked again.

She counts that the first time we met was after being chosen. I still remember that well too. I saw her friends circling her and congratulating her at school, in the lobby, just when I was getting a hot chocolate from the coffee machine. I knew those reactions couldn't be about anything else than the Japan exchange, since the e-mail about the choices was supposed to come that day. I hadn't had a chance to check my e-mail yet (Oh, the time before smartphones...), so I went to ask her who else was chosen. She tilted her head and looked at me with a ”Do I know you?” -look. Since then that expression has become all too familiar to me. Whenever she's caught off guard and doesn't get what's going on she has this same expression: Her whole face is a big frown and her mouth hangs open. But it seemed obvious even then that her brain was processing, so I waited. Then she concluded that the other name mentioned in the e-mail couldn't be anyone else's, and she pointed her finger at me.

I managed to find a picture from Japan where she has almost that exact expression except the frown is not as strong in this one.

She tells me I was funny, because I kind of tried to do a very slow pirouette to celebrate, without spilling my hot chocolate. And later she got kind of embarrassed about pointing at me, thinking it must have looked rude, but, excuse me, who cares, I'd just heard that we were going to Japan! One of my high school dreams was coming true!

I don't even know where to start with Japan, really. It may have been the best, but it was also the weirdest trip of my life. I had never been that far from home, so I guess the culture shock was to be expected. Everything about Japan made me feel like I had stepped into another world completely, even though the Japanese and the Finnish as a people are significantly similar in a lot of ways if you look past the initial culture shock.

Anyway, feeling out of place started the moment I got out of the plane.

The air. So. Humid. For a moment I thought it would bother me for the whole three weeks, it just felt so heavy to breathe. I had never felt like the air itself was difficult to breathe. But in the end I got used to it surprisingly fast.

But I suppose the most significant thing that made me feel so out of place there was that I'm used to blending in with the crowd. In Finland I've always been exactly medium height, medium blonde with medium length hair, not fashionable but not exactly quirky (maybe a little now that I'm older). I've never drawn much attention in Finland. But oh dear, Japan was a whole new ball game. I'm sure a lot of foreigners have had a similar experience in Japan, but, honestly it felt completely ridiculous. The same attributes that made me completely inconspicuous in Finland, made me the center of attention in Japan. And you would think that Japanese people are as reserved as Finns and understand personal space? As if... For some reason people there seemed to think it was completely fine to touch my blonde hair without asking, to stare into my blue eyes at almost a kissing distance and stare really obviously and without shame at my E-cups, just because they find these things exotic.

I think we could almost play another round of every anime fan's favourite game... "Spot the Main Character" with this picture. (I'm not even the only foreigner in it but I'm still the one to stick out first.)

And because it was an all-girl school, I essentially got to experience what it's like to be "the prince of the school". I'm not even kidding. Groups of girls would start screaming, actually truly screaming, when me and Rita walked past in the corridor. Sometimes someone wanted to give their e-mail to us or ask us to add them on Facebook or something and they would always blush so deeply and have a bunch of girls behind them cheering them on.

It was baffling to me. If this wasn't my fifteen minutes of fame, I don't know what is. And it was kind of a shock to me that Japanese girls actually did behave like the girls do in all the manga that I had read for a few years by then. I always assumed it was exaggerated, but really, it isn't, not significantly, anyway.

And some random guys on the streets were equally baffling. Once when I was just walking out of a train, minding my own business, a guy came behind me and almost jumped in front of me, like close, and yelled: "Konnichiwa!" at my face. And then he slowly walked away, looking at me the whole time with a manic smile on his face. He didn't even look where he was walking!

For some reason it was me who got the most attention out of the two of us, even though we're both blond and Rita is the loud one.

I didn't always appreciate how random strangers thought it was okay to be so rude (because I was an interesting foreigner?) but I really loved my host family and I'm pretty sure the feeling was mutual. They made sure I got to do everything I wanted to do there, they even took me out to eat sushi multiple times because they knew it was my favourite food, even though it's considered to be pretty festive food.

Don't I look happy. You won't find a sushi place in Finland where the sushi comes to your table on a conveyor. What.

I certainly had a lot of new experiences there and I have to admit a lot of the most memorable ones had to do with food, because I had been reading so much manga and seen so much Japanese food in them that I never had a chance to taste before. One of the coolest things was the school bakery. Me and Rita both fell in love with panda shaped buns that had chocolate inside them and some other chocolate bun too that was kind of like a cinnamon roll but bigger and just with a lot of chocolate instead of cinnamon. I'm still sad I can't get those anywhere. I loved everything I tasted in Japan from takoyaki to yakiniku.

We had a lot of time to bond with Rita because exchange students had their own hangout room in the school and for some of the time we were the only ones. We also didn't go to every class with our host sisters, just some, and then we had some cool ones separately, like tea ceremony and Ikebana. But we also had a lot of time to spend in the exchange student room alone, and I got to witness a lot of Rita's randomness during the first week that I knew her. She would do things like lie on a table on her stomach because she had eaten something that made her feel bloated. She would climb on a chair just to look at the room from a different perspective. From the start, she was a very entertaining person to observe. Once she completely shocked some poor truck driver who was looking at us curiously, and she just smiled widely and waved at him as if they were best friends.

I was initially a little sad that we weren't expected to participate in everything. Like when we had an overnight camp with our host sisters' class we were not expected to make food with everyone or attend all of the activities. But, I must admit it was nice that we were also scheduled to bathe separately, because we had so much room, though it seems a little unfair. We got the whole bathroom for just the two of us, and we got to bathe first too. Even though we weren't exactly treated like everyone else, which would've been nice in a way, it was also nice to have a lot of time to bond with my new friend. She was interesting to me from the start, because she was so free and easy in a way. I was used to people opening up to me, but she took it a step further, like asking me to massage her and braid her hair and lie beside her in her bed before we went to sleep, even though we had really known each other for just days. She was also kind of brutal. Like, when we took that bath she took a long good look at me and said: "Well, you're exactly like a hentai girl with your boobs and your mellow personality." Haha... But for some odd reason I didn't mind any of it at all. I just found her personality very curious.

I had some troubles in Japan too. Like the fact that it took 1,5 hours to get to school from my host family's house and it took three trains and two buses and some walking on top of all that. And it's not really the time or the long way but the fact that there are so many people everywhere. I am not used to such crowds and it drained me of energy completely. Sometimes I was so tired I fell asleep right after coming home from school.

Language was another issue, since I don't really speak Japanese. I took one course in high school but it's nothing really. I probably picked more up from anime than that course. And the level of English of Japanese high school kids it pretty much the level of my Swedish. (Bad, even though I studied it from seventh grade.) Our host sisters went to a special English class so they were better than average and communicating with them was fine, but I always needed my host sister to translate to her parents and some teachers too.

Certainly there were some cultural differences that were not easy to pick up on or understand. The thing we were the most bewildered by was that pretty much no one in our host sisters' class actually liked manga or anime, but instead they loved things like High School Musical, Hannah Montana and Justin Bieber completely unironically. In Finland no one older than maybe 13 would. (Or if they did most people wouldn't admit it.) And as the weeks went by it became clear that this might be a part of a bigger phenomenon. It seemed to us that the Japanese kids our age were treated in a way that seemed younger than they were, from our perspective. Maybe it's a part of the communal culture in Japan. Students were made to do things like walk in pairs during a field trip (something that would never happen in Finland after elementary school). Everything about their life in and outside of school seemed so scheduled to us. I think kids tend to have a much longer leash, so to speak, in Finland when they are much younger. It seemed to us like Japanese kids were mostly taught to obey and not ask questions. While in Finland I think that kids generally would assume they have a right to know why some things need to be done a certain way, and if they're given a good reason they're happy to do it, but they would feel a need to know why. I'm speaking very generally of course, but that's the feeling I got in Japan: Asking "why" didn't seem like a cool thing to do.

I think what I liked about the people there the most was that I was not expected to be outspoken or talkative. I realize that it probably comes from a place that has many problematic aspects as well, but, people tend to assume that Finland is a country of introverts, and while that may be true in large scale, any day in Finland is still always a draining experience for me socially. I feel like I have to use every last bit of my tiny storage of extroverted energy just to get by. I didn't feel like this in Japan very much. I had other issues, like crowds and attention that drained my energy too, but I didn't feel like I needed to pretend to be more extroverted than I was, very much. All I needed to do was half smile and nod and people loved me for it. Writing it out makes me feel a little icky about it now, because it makes me think of all the ways in which that is problematic, but back then I was just happy because it made my life easier.

Here's another thing that Japanese people can do unironically which is actually really cool. They had beauty contests at school where boys dressed as girls, and they were very convincing. Almost none of them were over the top, they just all looked really good in skirts and wigs and put serious effort into it. In my middle school some boys dressed as Spice Girls one time but they didn't even try to do it well, it was all a big joke. I appreciated that this kind of thing in a high school festival could be not-a-joke. The picture is from our host sisters' friend's school were we went to see the cultural festival.

My main take away from the whole trip was my new friend, though. Of course, we got to know a little of each other before the trip began but essentially we got to know each other in Japan. I guess someone could say our friendship began in a "misattribution of attraction" sort of way since people say it's common to find another person interesting if you go through an adventure with them. But I think the ten years of ever deepening bond that all happened after those three weeks speaks louder. And still, without Japan, we probably never would've gotten to know each other, because neither of us was the kind of person that the other would've instinctively wanted to make friends with at first glance. So this is one of those situations where one distinct detail actually has the power to change your life. There was no way we would've found each other if we weren't chosen together for this escape from our normal reality. Sometimes it's only in extreme circumstances that you can really see someone, and that's definitely what happened to us.

We look like such awkward nerds.

We thought it was because of the time we spent away from our usual circles together that made our relationship difficult for other people to grasp from the start. But it was probably more than that. People didn't seem to be sure how to categorize our relationship and neither did we, for a long time. Maybe it's because we grew into what we are now, so slowly but so steadily that most people started assuming were we a couple before we did.