~ Prologue ~

Well, first posts are always the hardest, right? So I'll try to get it out of the way right now. Here we go!

I created this blog to share my experiences in Japan. So I guess it's more of a travelogue than a blog. (I'm going to avoid making some awful conglomeration of the words 'travel' and 'blog' right here to protect my blog's integrity.) I plan on posting here at least weekly -- maybe even semi-weekly. The posts will probably contain some pictures, news, videos, or anything I find interesting. I'm not an eloquent writer, so expect a lot of random punctuation and some confusing sentences. Still, I'll do my best to make my posts interesting and intelligible.

I decided on the name JapanGo! for my blog because:

    1) The word for 'Japanese' in Japanese is nihongo, a combination of nihon, meaning Japan, and -go, a suffix used to denote a language (I guess -- I can't think of another way to describe it). So I translated nihon into Japan, but left -go as go, making the title of my blog a pun on the Japanese word for Japanese, and also something like 'Let's go to Japan' in English. 

    2) I'm not very creative, and decided to settle for something cheesy.

    3) I thought it would be easy to remember but still original. (Of course, after I decided on the name I found out that someone had already stolen! the name for their blog -- except it's called japan-go, nowhere near as cool as JapanGo!)

    4) I wanted to use my super-awesome computer art skills to make a logo, and JapanGo! is short enough to make lots of different logos with!

But enough about the name of the blog. I leave for Japan on September 11, so until then I will be writing about what I want to do while I'm in Japan. I'm not sure how serious I'm going to be, but I definitely have some goals for my trip to Japan that I would like to write down. By writing down my goals I'll have more motivation to accomplish them so I don't feel like a failure! (Or something like that)

Also, on a final note, I'm going to try to make my posts as fun as possible, but I'm not experienced at posting in blogs. Some of my posts may have awful formatting, broken links, etc. I'm certain it will happen. But I'll get better. I promise!