[WingsToDiscovery]

I guess on topic.
My father lived in S. Korea and brought a lot of asian influence into the household. Even from my earliest memories, I remember learning how to use chopsticks, helping wash rice for the rice cooker, going to the local grocery and getting fresh kimchi and other asian produce, among other things.

I grew up in Baltimore, but I went to DC regularly as a child. My favorite place was always Chinatown. It wasn't really the fact that I could distinguish Chinese and Korean culture among the other asian cultures at such a young age, but I just knew that I liked them because they were different from the normal American lifestyle I was used to seeing.

When I was around 16 years old, a Filipino family became my next door neighbors. They were more than welcoming in showing me their culture and having me over to eat every day as my mother worked full time and my father was overseas. What made them unique other than their Filipino culture was that they had moved from Japan, where they'd been living for the past 6 years. Their son was about my age, so we hit it off quickly and he would share stories about life in Japan. I never had the intention of moving there or anything, but from then a lot of other Japanese related things started to accumulate, such as going to import car shows, and practicing martial arts.

Trying to keep this brief, my interest in Asian culture after that disappeared until I entered university. My macro-biology teacher was a native Japanese, and she often shared snippets of Japanese culture with the class. I still didn't ever plan on moving to Japan, but I kind of threw around some possibilities again.

Later, life got monotonous. I was in business school, but I didn't know what I wanted to do. I had planned on playing college lacrosse, but that didn't work out and I didn't have any solid plans other than continuing my business degree.

Then one day I applied to school in Japan and got in.