How to Pack Your Entire Life in 45 minutes

I’m leaving for the airport in 3 hours and I’m freaking out. I spent the entire summer looking forward to getting on the plane and flying to Japan, but now that that day is here, my heart feels like it’s going to burst out of my chest and bounce back to my room without me. Help!!
 

I’m from California and go to school in Massachusetts, so I’m plenty used to last minute packing and long plane rides, but international flights seem to be on a whole different level. I thought I was doing well by starting to pack a few days in advance, but it turns out that I completely forgot about the international date line and only just started packing the day of. Here’s a picture of what I have so far:

Just a shirt, a pair of jeans, five (5) boxes of floss, and a teddy bear in the upper right corner. All you need to survive for a semester, I guess! For all my fellow procrastinators out there: please learn from my mistakes, haha.*

It's a little stressful because I'm usually the kind of person who makes lists of and for everything so I don't miss anything. It looks like I'm ready to live it up in Japan though, at least.

This is part of a diary entry I wrote on the way back from the Japanese Consulate after picking up my visa. Hot tip for fellow southern Californians: you have to drive to Los Angeles to apply for and pick up your visa/passport, but on the bright side, it only takes 3 days to process! You can explore Little Tokyo while you're there too, since they're right next to each other. I've included a couple of pictures below that I took there! Walking through Little Tokyo really made it finally seem real to me that I actually am going to Japan, and that I'm leaving very soon, and that it's not all a dream.

*Disclaimer: I finished packing before I finished writing this and I just want to say that it wasn't actually that bad! I finished packing everything within 45 minutes. I was really overwhelmed at first but just followed the packing guide word for word and automatically finished it all. It feels a little strange to be travelling with such a light suitcase (I usually fill my big one to the maximum 50 pound limit when I go to school, but I only have it at 15 pounds right now), but it feels better to know that I'm going to be able to buy a bunch of sourvenirs to bring back.