I leave for Japan in six days, and I have nothing planned except a plane ticket \u2013 no hotel, no itinerary. I don\u2019t even know which cities I will be in.\u00a0<\/p>\n
By all standards, this is the point in the trip where I should have everything planned out. Normally, I would have created a color-coded Excel spreadsheet with multiple tabs and an accompanying Google Map with pins.\u00a0<\/p>\n
I would have searched through Reddit forums from 2015 late at night. I would have bookmarked breakfast spots near my hotel and stuffed sticky notes into Lonely Planet guidebooks borrowed from the library. Above all, I am a meticulous planner.<\/p>\n
Instead, all I have is a Delta boarding pass on my iPhone and a calendar reminder telling me when I need to be at DTW.<\/p>\n
Anyone who knows me knows this is deeply out of character.<\/p>\n
When people ask what my plans are, I shrug \u2013 a full-body shrug that denotes I have genuinely no idea where I will be going or what I will be doing.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Technically, the schedule is in the hands of the Japanese government, which feels equal parts pretentious and ridiculous to admit. I\u2019ll be meeting up with three coworkers, so yes, Mom, I\u2019ll be safe. Not that Japan is unsafe anyway.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Normally, uncertainty like this would make me anxious.\u00a0 I like knowing what I\u2019m supposed to do and when. I like knowing what train I\u2019m catching and where my hotel is. I like having backup plans for my backup plans.<\/p>\n
But for this trip, my Excel spreadsheet is blank. There isn\u2019t even a spreadsheet.<\/p>\n
The strangest part of all of this is that I\u2019ve done exactly one thing to prepare: I dove into Shohei Ohtani\u2019s Wikipedia page. Apparently, Japan is very into baseball, which is excellent news for me. I now know enough niche statistics to feel cultured. Ohtani has become my one allowed comfort in a sea of uncertainty.<\/p>\n
I\u2019m not someone who shows up and trusts the process. I\u2019m not someone who blindly lands in Haneda Airport with nothing but the blind faith that everything will work out.<\/p>\n
I\u2019ve always admired Anthony Bourdain from afar, simply because he seemed so unlike me \u2013 relaxed, effortlessly cool and rugged. His kind of travel always felt slightly impossible to me, with his willingness to let the trip unfold without trying to control it. I\u2019ve always been secretly envious of that freedom.<\/p>\n
For the first time in my life, I\u2019ll be doing something very unlike myself. The itinerary exists somewhere in a Japanese email thread I\u2019ve never seen, in a document written in a language I don\u2019t speak. And for once, I\u2019m okay with that.<\/p>\n
In approximately six days, I will be flying over the Pacific Ocean, eating airplane pasta with a ginger ale and watching \u201cCrazy Rich Asians.\u201d I\u2019ll stare at the tiny airplane on the flight map, inching over the ocean, and I will think about every life decision I\u2019ve ever made. I might take a nap. But one thing is for sure: There will be no plan.<\/p>\n
That\u2019s the part that feels quietly exciting.<\/p>\n
Maybe I\u2019ll wander into a new neighborhood in Tokyo that I\u2019ve never heard of and stumble down a tiny street glowing with lanterns and full of locals \u2013 the kind of evening that just can\u2019t be planned from a guidebook. <\/p>\n
Maybe I\u2019ll sit down at a counter next to strangers and eat the best meal of my life in a place that isn\u2019t labeled on Google Maps. Maybe the best part of my trip will be something I never could have scheduled in the first place.\u00a0<\/p>\n
Maybe it will be good for me.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"I leave for Japan in six days, and I have nothing planned except a plane ticket \u2013 no…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":183002,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34],"tags":[143,145,144],"class_list":{"0":"post-183001","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-oakland","8":"tag-oakland","9":"tag-oakland-headlines","10":"tag-oakland-news"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183001","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=183001"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/183001\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/183002"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=183001"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=183001"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=183001"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}