• 2019/08/26

    Hello~ Senga here!
    I kind of shared my memories from my trip with all of you.
    It was the best “input” time.*
    This time, for the first half of my trip I traveled  alone and met up with my acquaintance for the second half.
    I was excited and nervous to be traveling alone. It was fun. 
     More than anything, just by being in an unknown place, I was focusing more on things I don’t usually think about in Japan, so the amount of “input” I was getting was different. 
    It was an amazing trip. 
    There’s a question I frequently get asked. 
    Why do you go abroad alone?
    There are a lot of people who travel alone like me, and I think everyone has their own reasons. 
    There are people who just want to go for no particular reason. 
    I have clear reasons for going.
    I think I’ll talk about one of those reasons.
     We speak Japanese on a daily basis, 
    But are we really thinking about what we’re saying to the person talking to us?
    Don’t words just come out unconsciously?
    The simpler the conversation is, the more words just seem to come out automatically.
    Your emotions in that kind of conversation are close to nonexistent.
    I feel like the basic feelings of enjoyment, happiness, and sadness that we should be having in conversations like that are greatly weakening and we’re just exchanging words. 
    Of course, that means that the amount of emotion we put in a conversation has something to do with how important that person is to us. 
    I thought that I wanted to know what it feels like to not just listen to a person, but really understand what they say, and put together an answer in my own words again.
    In a language that I’m not fluent in, I could feel the importance of communication and the happiness I felt when I was able to listen to what the other person said and properly converse with them.  
    There are times when words come out of my mouth without thinking, and I’m not the type of person who is good at conversing in Japanese to begin with.
    That’s why even more so I shouldn’t speak without thinking. There’s also vocabulary and tempo to think about. 
    I think it’s important to think about what I’m saying, for myself as well as the person I’m talking to. 
    I often think too much and the conversation ends, and then I answer at weird times, and get told I’m not listening though. Lol. 
    But it’s important to work on increasing my speed while thinking about my words when speaking. 
    I think I still have a long way to go,
    But I thought the fastest way to get there would be for me to go to America alone and learn by communicating with people from another country. 
    That’s why I go abroad by myself. 
    This is one of the reasons why I travel abroad by myself.
    Surprisingly, it’s not because it’s kind of fun. 
    I like people. 
    That’s why, I want to keep returning to America from now on as well. 
    Next time, I want to go with an even wider vocabulary than this time. 
    It turned into a long post, but thank you for reading to the end. 
    This is my “Another sky”.
    Well then.

    [Senga selfie in a lounge on a sofa in what I assume is the airport. He’s wearing a simple black t-shirt and has sunglasses on his head.]