Our future is unknown and full of possibilities, but I hope it's some kind of happily ever after.
Written nearly five years ago when I was eleven years old, these were the final words of my first blog post here on Eryn On Earth. It all started when my parents and I left Hong Kong, the only home I knew, and embarked on a trip to travel around the world for a year. We spent 365 days visiting over 30 different countries, and I grew to truly appreciate travel and the culture, nature, and places it gave me the opportunity to see. It was an amazing trip which, thankfully, I can now look back on through my blog and all the photos we took along the way. I truly cultivated Eryn On Earth throughout the year, and it became a personal platform for me to share my travel stories. You can even still find my old posts from our travels in 2016 and 2017.
However, you may have noticed that I have been on a bit of a hiatus in recent years, and I haven't been all too active. As I started to focus more on school as I've gotten older, time got away from me, and I still haven't finished detailing all of the stories from our trip. I still have so much more I want to share, and since my summer break just started, I hope I'll be able to use the extra free time I have to bring the rest of my blog back up to date. But given that it's now 2021, nearly five years after we left Hong Kong, my story has changed since it all started. So here's a pause from my usual timeline of posts about the trip where we can fast-forward or, really, go back in time to the summer of 2017.
After spending a year on the road, my parents and I were brought full-circle, and our trip concluded when we returned to Hong Kong. It was nostalgic being back in the city, seeing its distantly familiar landmarks and streets, but it didn't quite feel like home anymore. Maybe it's cliche to say, but travel changed us, and we all realized there was no way we could go back to our old lives. So, we decided to continue living a nomadic lifestyle and ended up moving back and forth between two home bases, Thailand and Japan, three months at a time. They were natural places since my mom's family is in Thailand, and we had a small home in the countryside of Japan.
Geography aside, school is something that I haven't talked about on the blog before. Given that it's taken up a large part of my life and is the main reason I haven't been as active with posting, I suppose it's an important point to cover.
Although I left my school in Hong Kong when we started our trip, we discovered a new mode of learning that allowed me to continue my education while we were on the road, online schooling. Once we returned from our travels, however, I didn't go back to a traditional, physical school and decided to continue learning online. I really enjoyed the freedom and efficiency that I found in online schooling, and I'm still doing so to this day in high school. As we took this path in my schooling, it further allowed us to continue living nomadically, move back and forth between Thailand and Japan as well as travel to other countries, too.
This was our life for a while until the pandemic hit. We found ourselves grounded in Japan as countries locked down, and it wasn't worth the risk to travel between places anymore. So, since December 2019, we've remained in our countryside home in Japan.
Thankfully, my schooling largely wasn't affected by the pandemic, but it has been interesting seeing the rest of the world's students suddenly experience online schooling as I have for so long. Hearing from friends, the temporary virtual learning that they have done actually seems quite different from what I've experienced, so maybe I can share more about my online schooling journey in a future post.
Otherwise, that's my story, brought up to date five years later. I'm now sixteen years old, in Japan due to the pandemic, and a full-time online high schooler. Thank you for sticking around for all these years, and I hope you'll stay tuned for much more to come!
Read more about my story here!
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