THE WAY of Life in England (EN)

Every month on WOMENCANFLY.CO’s blog series, The Way, we introduce inspirational women who live abroad.

This time we meet Airi Nanase, who lives in Essex, England. Essex is located about 35 minutes east of London by train. It’s Airi’s seventh year of living in England and she has become accustomed to living there but for the first year, she cried every day because she wanted to go back to Japan. We talked about the loneliness she felt in the UK, the hardships of job hunting, childbirth in a foreign country and what raising a child in the UK is like.

Meeting the love of her life in her dorm

Airi has been learning English since she was in primary school and is the thing she has continued learning even though she gets tired easily. After that, she majored in English in high school and continued to study it.

After graduating from high school, she started working for a foreign pharmaceutical company. Training and meetings were held in English and many of the employees were in an environment where it was natural to speak English.

"I was inspired by my colleagues and seniors who worked in English and decided to study abroad because I wanted to master English perfectly!"

In May 2010, Airi left for New Zealand without even having decided where she would stay.

"New Zealand has opposite seasons to Japan so I arrived in early winter and because I’d come all the way there, I decided to snowboard and stayed in a dorm near a ski resort for a while."

This dorm had six-person rooms with five women and one man. The man who stayed in th