How can it have been ten years!?!

It seems impossible to believe that ten years have passed and we are back.  My arms long for the stroller to push little 18 month old Carlos in as we walk up and down the hills of Nagoya.  It is not, by any means, a beautiful city.  The architecture defines utilitarian.  But, it is Japan and everyone is so kind and sweet with the kids and it for sure scratches my travel bug itch.

This is where we lived for six months ten years ago (2007) after we left NOLA and were on our way to NM, and it is so sweet to return.  David is again teaching at the University of Nagoya (if you really want to aggravate him, put air quotes around the word "teaching."  He has four lectures total over two days in August.  Right now he is at the office "looking busy")

We arrived Tuesday night at 8:30 PM after 21 hours of travel to the gorgeous modern building we'd pined to live in last time.  We used to walk down to David's office from our run down, kind of buggy and very inconvenient apartment and pass by the Noyori Conference hall, where we knew these gorgeous apartments were.  We are in the apartment that was saved for Chemistry Nobel Prize winner Ryoji Noyori himself, but apparently he never used it, so they let visiting professors (or "professors" as I say to David) use it.

New fancy digs...

Old less fancy digs.  We were the apartment on the right where the glass windows are.

Although the place is gorgeous, it is a one bedroom loft with half of it a tatami room closed off by rice paper sliding doors (about as private as Les Nesman's tape walls from WKRP in Cincinnati).  Each half of the room has twin beds. The tatami room has two mattresses on the floor and the other half has two twin beds.  Should be an interesting 5 weeks sleeping with our children!