Hi everyone!

My name is Linda and welcome to my blog! This is a kinda late introduction but better late than never right? So let me first introduce this blog. This is my first blog ever and it is mainly meant to serve as a sort of diary for my exchange year in Japan (fall 2012 - summer 2013) so my closest friends and family can easily keep in touch with me.
I will mostly write about my experiences in Japan but also how I'm currently preparing for leaving my life and home in Sweden.
I'm also thinking that future exchange students can use my blog as a guide and contact me if they need help or tips.

What about me then? Well, I'm a sixteen-going-on-seventeen-year-old girl from Sweden... and Japan! Haha, I'm half - or haafu - in other words. My mother is Swedish and my father is Japanese. I was born and raised in Sweden, which has been great, but I really feel like I'm missing my japanese part too much. I have been to Japan 6 times before in my life but never have I learned the language or it's culture. About two years ago I made a wise decision to change that. I started to study Japanese one time a week at a language school in Stockholm where I live. I demanded that my father would finally talk Japanese to me as much as possible! (Although this part is something that I'm still struggling with... :P) And then, about one year ago, my mother actually showed me an advertisement brochure from a company called explorius. She had already flipped the page to the Japan section and there my exchange-story began. My journey so far has had it's ups and downs for sure and I'm not even in Japan yet! So I would predict that you will see looooots of crazy, fun, complicated, interesting and most of all new things popping up on the blog!