Made it back to Australia mostly unscathed, but a serious case of the sleepies got me good.

Saga didn’t really have a mid-term break, and the semesters don’t line up 1:1 between Japan and Australia so I got back to my home university during week 2 of semester 2.

Took three subjects during second semester; two of which had online sessions as well as on-campus sessions, so I was able to sit in on those for week 1, which was also exam week at Saga, not necessarily something I’d recommend but I use stress and anxiety interchangeably and I’m chronically anxious anyway so what difference does it make to double-down on the stress?

Insane choice to go to Kyushu during spring/summer, I do not do well in warm weather or humidity and it was just. 35 degrees with 95% humidity all the time. It’d be grey, dark, raining, and I’d think “Great, it’s cold today!”

_{W R O N G ! (It is 35℃ .)}

Nighttime? The same.
Dad says it’s because it’s so flat in Saga, that the mountains I’m used to are what causes the temperature here to drop at night.

There’s a selfie I sent to my family of how bad the humidity was but… looking at it on a large computer monitor makes it so much worse than the small phone screen. Just know my mother described me as looking like “a melted candle” and Kyushu summer is quite possibly the least comfortable I have ever been in my entire life.

_{Please enjoy this photograph of the paper wasp that lived outside my apartment instead.}

For the final few days in Saga I’d grabbed a hotel near the train station so I could clean out the apartment and get packed up with the things I was keeping while getting everything else in the appropriate trash (the trash sorting instructions were 12 pages long, by the way, very thorough). Lost a cute T-shirt somewhere along the way and I’m still upset about it.

Graduation was in the morning on the same day as my flight home. Thought I’d have enough time but taking the local bus back to the hotel I watched as the airport bus left the station. Awful feeling, those bad boys only run, like, every 4 hours. It was possible to take a train but would definitely have cut things close, not to mention the size and weight of my luggage, so the hotel hooked me up with a taxi instead.

It was pretty deluxe, had televisions in the seats and everything. The driver got me to the airport with plenty of time to spare and helped get the luggage onto a trolley, 10/10 service overall, would recommend. Not least because there was no way I could lift that shit unassisted; if I was smart I would’ve intermittently shipped things home, but I’m not and the luggage limit was 23kg with a maximum of 32kg. Catch me making more culls into the airport bins and shuffling smaller items into carry-on which was definitely already over the limit on account of my laptop alone weighing like 7kg. Fortunately nobody weighed the carry-on on the way there and I was willing to throw those fucking dice that they wouldn’t on the way home either.

Presumably they took one look at my cane wielding frail ass and assumed nothing I was hauling could be more than about 2.5kg unassisted.

_{All the flights to and from were Cathay Pacific.}

The first flight was about 2 or 3 hours, from Fukuoka to Hong Kong, where I appreciated the 5 hour stopover as there wasn’t enough time to get cleaned up between the ceremony at Saga and my flight from Fukuoka, so I took a minute to eat, wash up and change into more comfortable clothing for the second flight.

Hong Kong to Melbourne was about… 6-8 hours? Spent it kind of half asleep watching movies. Despite my luggage being full of Furbies and me ticking every single box on the customs declaration, border patrol were not interested in searching me. Not gonna lie, I was a little disappointed.

Better luck next time?

_{Sadly Tomy has RL disease, so will be a display piece unless a fix becomes available.}

Semester two is over now as well, final essay submitted last Friday. Grades haven’t been released yet so it’s obsessively refreshing the results tab time until they are.

Things were pretty stressful this semester, ideally I can spend the summer playing video games, but I’m back in Paperwork Hell™ for non-educational purposes until basically the end of the year, so who even knows?

Take care.