Visiting My Home Country

I’ve been living in Japan for almost 3 years at the time I’m writing this. Since I moved here fully, I have only traveled back to my home country England once.

For a while after moving away to Japan, I wasn’t really missing England that much, but as time went on, I eventually started to miss it. I missed my family, my friends, and my cat. Though I like many kinds of Japanese food, I missed English food, and English supermarkets.

After about 2 and a half years, I finally went back to England on vacation. It was really nice visiting home again, as 2 and a half years felt to me like too long. I could see my family, I could go around my hometown, and I could experience English supermarkets again.

Honestly, I wish that I could visit England more often, but the biggest obstacle to this is how much it costs.

The flight tickets are the most obvious expense of visiting England, and they can be really expensive. I managed to get a good price last time though because I booked the tickets a long time before the flight dates.

However, there were 2 factors that forced me to save up money for a long time.

The first was that I needed to pay my rent while I was away. The second was that I wasn’t earning any money while I was on vacation. The combination of those 2 things required lots of money to be saved up before I went on the trip.

Saving up enough to pay for trips to England takes me a long time, so even though I would like to visit more often than I do now, I think it’s very difficult to do that. If I’m always trying to save a ton of money, it takes away from what I can do in my regular life. It’s one of the biggest downsides of living abroad.

By living abroad, it seems I’m faced with a choice. If I want to constantly travel between England and Japan, it’s going to drain my money in a big way, all the time. I’ll spend the whole year or more saving up, only to spend it all at once and go back to the starting position again.

Perhaps, in order to make myself more financially stable and invest in my life, it’s required that I commit to living in one place, and only take big trips once every 3+ years, or something like that. That would grant me more time to save money and invest in other things instead of repeating the cycle of saving a bunch of money and spending it all on going back to England. Of course, the downside of this is that I wouldn’t be visiting home all that often, which is kind of sad.

So, I wonder about how often I should visit home. Japan and England are just so far away from each other, so traveling between them is quite a commitment in both time and money.

It’s something I’m currently thinking about.

Thomas

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Vocabulary
eventually (adverb) – in the end, after a long amount of time
obstacle (noun) – something that is in the way of a path or goal
obvious (adjective) – easily seen or understood
factor (noun) – a circumstance or fact that contributes to a result