FORBES, OCTOBER 17, 1988 Pamela Fernuik
November 3rd, 1983, I flew economy on Korean Airlines, on a one-way ticket to Bangkok, with a stop-over in Tokyo. I entered Narita airport as a tourist. I left the snow and cold of Saskatchewan, Canada for the snow and cold of Japan.
In my small gray backpack were clothes, a series of black and white 8×10 photographs and a 35 millimeter Nixon camera. I planned on staying.
On the airplane I kept reading my Guide to Tokyo book. I had a reservation at a hotel in Takadanobaba, but I wasn’t sure how to get from the airport to the hotel. The pages were worn, from the continual reading and re-reading.
When I bought my plane ticket, my friends had just left Canada for Japan. They were going to get an apartment, find jobs teaching English and meet me at the airport. They didn’t like Tokyo and the Japanese people. They told me about the drunk Japanese business men on the trains at night, and they decided not to stay. They flew to Bangkok, Thailand and invited me to come and spend Christmas with them in Bangkok.
I really wanted to live in Tokyo and teach English, while trying to get work as a photographer. I had just graduated from the Alberta College of Art in Calgary, Alberta, and I was working in construction saving my money for the trip to Japan. Going to Tokyo alone seemed too hard, so I agreed to meet them in Bangkok.
Two weeks before I left the phone rang in my studio apartment in Calgary. It was Susan, my friend who was in Bangkok waiting for me to get there.
“Hey, Pamela, guess where I am?”
I had no idea, I couldn’t guess. She was supposed to be in Thailand. Where else could she be?
“I am in Edmonton, back in Canada. We got sick in the Opium dens and came home.”
There would be nobody to meet me at the airport. I wasn’t flying to Bangkok, I would fly to Tokyo and try to get work teaching English. She gave me the name of the hotel she had stayed in. I wrote them a letter with the date of my arrival. I hoped they got the letter in time.
I didn’t know how it would end, but I knew I was going to start.
Start, even if you don’t know how it will end. [Would you like to tweet? tweet tweet]
Thirty years later, I see how fortunate I was that I didn’t fly to Bangkok. What was I thinking? How was I suppose to get home if I spent all my money in Thailand? I didn’t have a ticket home.
For I know the plans I have for you,” declares the Lord, “plans to prosper you and not to harm you, plans to give you hope and a future.
Jeremiah 29:11
It was in Japan that I found Jesus.
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Tomorrow I will write what happened when the plane landed.
Have you ever started on an adventure and not been sure how it would end? Please tell me in the comments.
