My full name is Travis J. Cote. The J stands for James although I never use it nor does anyone else. When I was younger (I mean elementary school student young) I was commonly called T.J. I don’t tell many people that so please, don’t start using it.
Anyway, I was born in the state of Vermont and lived in Vermont until I attended university. I did go to the University of Vermont my freshman year but transferred to the the University of Colorado at Boulder during my sophomore year. One of the best years of my life without a doubt. For my final 2 years of undergrad I moved back to Vermont and graduated from the University of Vermont.
About a year after graduating, I moved to Kyoto, Japan. Well, that’s not entirely accurate. I went to Japan to visit my girlfriend at the time because it was the Christmas season and her family couldn’t visit so I thought someone should visit her during the holiday! I was given a 3 month visitor visa but through some strange twists of luck, I ended up staying for 3 years! Basically I ended up taking over an English teacher’s job who, for personal reasons, had to cut her contract short and return to the U.K. My girlfriend at the time (now my wife) was working on the JET Programme as an English teacher/assistant and the woman who returned to the U.K. was her colleague on the same programme.
Kyoto was amazing; that experience will never be forgotten and I still look back on those memories fondly. We were young, living in a very foreign country and earning our own money, what was not to like about it? Fast forward 3 years and my girlfriend and I returned to Vermont to attend graduate school at St. Michael’s College, also in Vermont.
To be continued…
トラ's Tiger Threads 