Australia Entry #21 - October 25th, 2025 - November 8th, 2025

Images and Videos

It’s been a while since my last post

It’s been almost two months now since I was out in Japan and I’ve been delaying writing this blog post because I had recently felt overwhelmed by life. I think as the holidays have been approaching I’ve started to feel a bit homesick, a bit left out from friends and family, and a bit silo’ed off. Everything I have done in the last few months has felt like a committed effort of trying too hard, and while I am happy that I have done the things I have, I am in the need to go just look back and reflect with some memories of a more care-free time. It’s very easy for life to just slip away from you. It’s been a while since I have gone hiking with the hiking group I usually go out with and I’ve found it very difficult to strike a balance between trying to push myself to try new things and having a healthy amount of time to decompress and relax and revitalize myself. I’m writing this at 2 AM as I can’t sleep while I have all these thoughts in my head and try to “not waste time”. I feel like I wasted my weekend as I sat at home during a rainy Sunday and watched youtube videos and movies and Saturday was not much better. I have one more post that I’ll write this year after this one, which is usually about me reflecting on the whole year, seeing what I had accomplished but also seeing what did not go as well as I wished. It also acts like an avenue for me to plan out what I want to focus on in the next year, so I’ll keep more of my internal thoughts swirling around until then.

Reminiscing on Japan

When I first started working and making enough money for me to be able to put money away for bigger trips and occasions, me and my closest hometown friends decided that my friend’s first trip outside of the US would be as a boy’s trip out to see and experience Japan. When I moved out to Australia, I had them double down that this would be a committed thing we do and while our dates changed and delayed from early spring into late October, we finally hammer out all the details and went.

What I tend to do with these blog posts is open and view the photos I took during my different trips and try to put into words the reasons I took the photos or the emotions that they stirred in me, but I think before I do that, I wanted to just mention that this trip meant a lot to me personally. I feel like while I’ve made friends in college and in Wisconsin after moving for work, I have only ever really stayed in touch and tried to keep up with my friends from my hometown and high school days. It’s been really difficult for the last 4 years, but especially during my time in Australia to make the same kind of lifelong relationships that I was able to make with them, and while we talk less often due to timezones or in general as life has gotten busier with work, I know that they have my back and I hope they feel the same that I have theirs. I feel like this trip was a celebration of over a decade of friendship with each of them.

My favorite moments

The photos linked to the top of this blog post are definitely a Japan overload. There are over 2,000 photos over the span of two weeks there, some of which I haven’t even fully processed as I opened up the album for my friends to post into as well. While it’s definitely too much to go into each and every day, at the end of our trip my friends and I reflected on which days we liked the most, and I don’t think my answers have changed much, but there were slight shifts in order. On a side note, don’t bring a bag of sour patch kids unopened from the airport as they won’t last a day when your friends arrive at the Airbnb.

One, the Shibuya and Shinjuku day. I think I initially put this lower in my rankings but just realized when going through photos that this was the most fulfilling day we had. We got to go shopping, experience a great cafe in the morning that Josh recommended, and experience unique atmospheres of cultural and modern parts of Japan. Ending in Shibuya with some drinks was also nice as we hadn’t seen each other in quite a while which made the day more memorable.

Two, Nara. I think if Josh was still with us at this point of the trip this would have been easily propelled to my favorite day of the trip. It was great to add a flavor of the outdoors with experiencing the unique deer and temples that are only really found in Japan and nowhere else in the world. Ending by seeing a humongous Buddha statue and a nice meal at a random restaurant cemented the day at the top.

Three, Studio Ghibli World. I think if I had a deeper appreciation of the Ghibli movies (which I plan to do next year) and if the experience wasn’t already similar in my mind to the museum I went to in Singapore, this would have been higher on the list. It was a blast, especially looking back at pictures, seeing all the fun poses we thought of and I think that everyone had a great time exploring the exhibits and the recreation of all the unique houses from things like Kiki’s Delivery service to of course Howl’s Moving Castle can’t be experienced anywhere else.

Four, climbing Mt Nantai. It kind of came out of nowhere that we decided to take a train up north multiple hours from Tokyo because we had an extra day kind of unplanned, but it was a day I remember, less because of the significance of how it makes me remember Japan, but more because I pushed myself to do something I wasn’t sure I was able to do. It had been a while since I went hiking and I didn’t have all the logistics planned out, but I went head first into attempting it. The day before I planned most of the trip and what I wanted to do while eating lunch the day prior. I don’t think there was anything crazy memorable about the hike up or the town that we ended up in, but the lead up and the pay off of being at the top of an inactive volcano and taking a picture with a large katana blade statue was memorable and fulfilling.

I can go on and on about all the different days, but I think I’ll end my writing here and live through the days in the future by going through the google photos we put together. What I can say is that I enjoyed a lot of things that I didn’t think I would enjoy as much knowing myself so I’m glad Japan and my friends pushed me beyond what I knew I would enjoy experiencing. I didn’t think I would enjoy the time we spent shopping as much as I did and if I had more space in my bag and we did it a little later into the trip I would have probably returned with much more from Japan. I also didn’t expect to enjoy having a bar or restaurant to return to as much as I did. While we hopped around to a bunch of different places to drink, and Dhruv definitely found the best bar I’ve ever been in in Osaka, the most memorable ones were the ones we found at random and went back to a few times in Kyoto.

I don’t think this is my last time going to Japan, but I do think that I was fully Japan’ed out by the end of the two weeks. But, now I have the unique opportunity that some of my friends don’t have, in that they have watched anime and played games and enjoyed Ghibli movies before this trip to Japan. After a new appreciation of Japan, and having more context of what life is like and different cities there, I am going to try to watch all the Studio Ghibli films (and rank them) as well as play more games and watch more anime now that I have this backdrop of what Japan as a country is all about.

Fun Songs