I am starting this blog, because I will be spending seven weeks in Japan this summer on a scholarship, and I figure that it will be easier to keep a blog updated than tell the same story forty thousand times (to my parents and my friends and my friends' friends and my parents' friends and my...well, you get the idea). If you are a stranger who (somehow) managed to stumble onto this blog, well, hi there. I kind of wonder how you managed to find this, but, oh well, you're here now. Maybe you will learn something. Maybe you won't learn something. Maybe you'll just run away screaming.
Some quick orders of business:
The opinions in this blog are my own and not the opinions of the United States Department of State, even though they're the ones who gave me the scholarship. (Can you call a department "they"? It seems like a department should be an "it," but saying "it gave me a scholarship" is very weird. English, you are such a strange language.) If I say/type something weird/dorky, it's me saying/typing it, not the US government. Just FYI.
If you're wondering about the name of the blog, my nickname is Calamari, and some people call me "Squid." If you didn't know that, well, you're probably one of many. So, anyway, because I am a paranoid person when it comes to the internet, I'm writing under a pseudonym. Yay.
Anything else? Oh, yes, I'm not leaving until Monday, but I figured that it was better to start this now than when I am super jet-lagged and would probably accidentally set the default language on the blog to be Swedish or something.
(I don't speak Swedish, if you were wondering.)
(I'm not sure how to set the default language to Swedish. I'm not entirely sure you can do such a thing. But if you can do it, I'm pretty sure that if I tried to set up a blog while I was jet-lagged, I would do it.)
Oh, and I will probably type random things in Japanese every once in a while, because that is what I'm going to Japan to study. 私は日本語がまだまだですけど、一生懸命頑張って、だんだん上達すると思います。四年間日本語を勉強しましたけど、たぶん文法と単語の間違えがたくさんありますから、間違えれば、直してくれてありがたいんですが。（例えば、間違えをなおすのは「直す」か「治す」、どちらがいいかと分かりません。「直す」かもしれません。）
Anyway, enough of that. Let's post this thing. 8 days until I'm in Japan!
