Japan

I suppose this will be my final blog. Our internet gets cut off tomorrow and we will be busy packing and saying our goodbyes. What an incredible experience this has been. As I said tonight at dinner to our lovely group of friends, I never thought we would put down roots here. And after pulling up all of our roots in New Orleans it is certainly a bit hard to do it again. But we hope we can maintain the friendships we have made here and the connection with this warm and fascinating country.

I hear Carlos snoring away in his little room in our apartment. 600 square feet of fake wood floors and a thimble-sized kitchen that has been our home for six months. There are cranes and diggers outside building a new road about five feet from our window. There are still bugs and grumpy university housing people who make us a bit nuts. But we decorated it and bought toys and made it a cozy place to live and we will miss it too.

Carlos has gone from 16 months to a two year old. He is the most divine little creature with a sense of comic timing that makes us think he is probably an old soul. His eyes are still green and his hair is still blondish, but we were there when he arrived and we are 100% sure he is ours. We do not want to say goodbye to his school as we know it is one of a kind and would never exist in the states. Just today they made little halloween costumes and took the kids trick or treating in a neighboring building. Fifteen teeny witch hats on fourteen teeny Japanese kid and one chubby little white kid.


David was not exactly the first one off the plane when we landed. It took him a little while to adjust to the food and the fact that nobody spoke English. but he has loved it as much as I have and is equally pained to say farewell. I am so proud of everything he has accomplished here. His lectures were unbelievably well attended. He was asked to guest lecture 3 or 4 times outside of the university. And everyone he worked with seemed genuinely thrilled with his contribution.

Japan is a wonderful and complex place with a sprinkle of perversity and several dollops of corruption. Somehow it is a place that despite daily headlines of corporate and governmental graft has maintained its innocence and seems to lack any cynicism. When people have asked us the difference between our cultures, we have generally answered that Japanese are not paranoid and aggressive the way Americans are. They don't assume that everyone's intentions are bad and they don't act out in anticipation of those bad intentions. Most everyone loves children here and a gleeful shoeless Carlos running laps around the restaurant is more likely to elicit laughs and tickles from strangers than dirty looks or "can you keep your kid quiet" comments.

Thank you everyone for reading my blog. I know I tapered off in the end, but I hope you did enjoy what you read. I tried to just be me and not edit too much simply because my mom might be reading it. As you could probably tell, we had a truly wonderful time and are beyond grateful to our friends Neil and Adena Boris for hooking us up with the experience in the first place.

So, now we head to Albuquerque to see what is there. We certainly have more to give and share than we did six months ago. If we are lucky, we will find friends even half as wonderful as the ones we have here.