Mount Fuji: Part 1 of 3

SEE EPISODE THREE

Read about my Fuji experience in greater detail: Part One, Part Two and Part Three.

I was in Shibuya: the busy entertainment district of Shibuya-ku, one of the centrally located wards of Tokyo. I had been telling a friend that climbing Mount Fuji had long been a goal of mine when he mentioned the climbing season for Fuji-san was coming to a close. (Stations, ten of which are littered along the Fuji ascending trail, and rangers are only active from July to late August). Back in the States, I (probably laughingly) consider myself a bit of an outdoor enthusiast, but was without any form of hiking or camping gear. Yet, I knew, there walking alongside a train station in Asia’s busiest city, that that moment was so very likely my only opportunity in my entire life to try to climb Mount Fuji.

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For Starters

Everyone who is in Japan raise your hand. Note: I am typing with one hand.

Clever, I know. I am writing to you in my small – but expensive – two hundred thirty square foot apartment which I share with another here in the quiet residential Meguro-ku ward of Tokyo (one of 23 such municipalities). It has been quite a little adventure already, but let’s get ourselves orientated, no?

In the realm of self-evaluation, I love to consider myself the elder statesman of travel – at least for an independently traveling twenty-year-old. While most of my extended absences from my northwest New Jersey home have been wanderings throughout the continental United States, I spent the summer of 2005 in Ghana, West Africa. That was my first attempt at using education as a façade for international travel. Here in Tokyo I am keeping up that very pretext, though the time before I fall asleep is spent dreaming of travel and language, not books and tests.

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Africa (My summer abroad in Ghana, West Africa)

Posing alongside children after playing soccer with them in Nkwantanan.

I spent this summer in the West African country of Ghana, living in East Legon, a hamlet outside the capital city of Accra. (Read up on the fairly stable democracy here.)

I lived in a hostel on the campus of the University of Ghana, where I was studying politics and the West African aesthetic.

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