Forward

The years from 2019 to 2021 saw something unexpected for people around the world. In the beginning, no one would have expected this pandemic - later called Covid-19 - to last long, and would give serious influence to our lives.

 
My life changed greatly due to the outbreak of Covid-19. I was working at a travel company in Tokyo which send tours mainly to Europe, as well as Asia, Oceania and the Americas. 

Since March 2020, the businesses were cancelled, and due to prolonging Covid situation all over the world, the company had to make decision to announce a redundancy plan. I left the company in early autumn.

Since then, my life became both busy and slow in a way. I searched for job vacancy at home and at job centre and applied to whatever of the job that I got interested in. 

At the same time, I begun taking regular walk and cycle around my neighbourhood as exercise. 

During daily walks, I began noticing how the life around us seemingly relaxed and unchanged – particularly the nature seems unaffected - well, the virus are invisible so it is obvious nothing seems to have changed. 

However, flowers were budding, the ocean kept sending waves upon the shore, the sun and the moon were shining. And there was always some small changes of the season in the nature, just like in any other years in this eastern part of Japan.

In this blog, I would like to portray the nature and a bit of my family’s life during the Covid year, how we still managed to have enjoyed the year during the restrictions. 

Particularly, I would like to focus on the beauty of the nature in my hometown and nearby. It was a consolation to see the changing of the seasons among nature, particularly after meeting and bypassing loads of people every day wearing face masks even in summer - a reminder of the fact that we were in the middle of pandemic. 

I hope I can share some of the beauties that I came across during 2020 – 2021.