It has now been exactly one month since I’ve gone on the sabbatical leave. As I’m writing this post, I still have to recover from last night’s Halloween party in Shibuya, Tokyo. Gotta admit, however, that it was much more chill in terms of craziness compared to the raves I’ve been at in Berlin and elsewhere.

Maybe it’s for the best though – one of the reasons to have my sabbatical in Asia was to make sure I stay away from Berlin at least during the winter. The weather there won’t be pleasant anyway, in comparison with Thailand, where I’m headed again in a couple weeks.

During the past 3 months that I have been away from Berlin (two of which were mostly due to being in Asia for work purposes), I finally managed to somewhat slow down in terms of just doing things.

Berlin is a massive city that has pretty much anything to offer. For someone coming from a relatively remote and definitely tiny Estonia like me, all the hedonism that Berlin provides is something I find hard to refuse. Among other things, I literally moved there for that (and for a better work environment too, of course – a little more on that in some future post).

Now, about the sabbatical itself – my plan for it was to not have any particular agenda. Once I’m done with my 1.5 months in Tokyo, I’ll head back to Southeast Asia, yet again without any particular itinerary.

This is very much deliberate, simply because all I usually do in my daily life is make (contingency) plans. I really need a break from that, and so far just being in Japan without a plan has been oh so refreshing.

I first landed in Osaka, hoping to make it to the 2025 World Expo in its last few weeks. As the online ticket sales ended, my bet was on showing up on the spot to claim the entry early in the morning – but even then I was outmaneuvered. I had to enjoy Osaka without the Expo, which luckily had more than enough to offer – along with the wider Kansai region.

It was certainly a wonderful feeling to be able to take a quick train to Kobe – just to have some Kobe beef for lunch, or go to Nara for a day to enjoy some tranquility around its local sacred deer.

After Osaka, however, I was scheduled to go to Kyoto for a few days (where I accidentally saw the Emperor’s motorcade – he waved at us too), before I headed to Tokyo for the rest of my stay in Japan. It was not news for me that Kyoto was overcrowded due to increased interest in tourism by the foreigners, but boy – did I not anticipate the scale of the problem.

For the 3 days that I stayed in Kyoto, each one of these I had to queue for at least half an hour to any restaurant in the city just to have lunch. That’s how many tourists this city currently has visiting, thanks to its historical importance, unmatched aesthetics and a very good recent exchange rate of the Euro against the Japanese Yen.

(Side note: it is my 4th time in Japan in the last 10 years, and for the first time it was not American English dominating among the foreigners. Instead I kept hearing mostly European languages like Dutch, French and Polish – especially proud of the latter considering my Eastern European roots. Japan is not the easiest place to get to.)

After Kyoto it was time to head to Tokyo for the next 40 days. Thinking that I probably won’t be back in the country after the sabbatical for at least a year, I decided to splurge a little – and went for the Green Car (1st class) ticket for the Shinkansen bullet train. Here’s the view of Mount Fuji from my window:

After making it to Tokyo I joined a local table tennis club. It was a nice change from attending usual meetups wherever I went. At least this time I had something to bond over with other international residents (and locals) in Tokyo. Back in the uni days we’d play table tennis just to pass some time in-between lectures, so it was a great throwback combined with making new friends.

(Thanks to these new friends I ended up at this Halloween party in Shibuya.)

Of course, during the first few weeks of this sabbatical I’ve come to terms with the fact that this lifestyle is exactly what I want to keep doing – so I began to work on streamlining my passive income situation to make sure I go on these kind of adventures more often, whether with part-time work or no employment at all.

Sadly the German corporate framework cannot provide the same degree of flexibility that the Estonian digital government does. I suppose I’m lucky to be a citizen of Estonia thanks to that – we’re taught and allowed to be flexible early on.

I won’t get into too much detail on the differences Germany vs. Estonia in this post, but consider this – you need an actual physical address in Germany for receiving paper mail, because that is how you communicate with the government. First of all, why do we still have to use paper mail in 2025?

Second, if I want to do the digital nomad thing, that means I have to rent some apartment in Germany without having to live there, just to keep the tax residency? Doesn’t Germany have a housing crisis already? I’m happy to be paying taxes to the country without having to be there all the time, yet that’s not something the state allows.

Anyway, I’ll end this post at that. Hopefully this was a good insight into my past month – please let me know via hello@jev.fyi if there is something in particular you’d like to see in the next post.