Nothing But Words

Tomorrow, Maria, Kai, and I are off to Japan. We’ll endure about 19 hours of traveling (16 in the air, 3 on the train), so I hope Kai doesn’t totally melt down. After our plane arrives, we’ll take the train to Zushi, which is the town Maria’s family is from, and stay at her Aunt’s house. Then we’ll spend a few days in the town (the name of which escapes me) where Maria will be attending a conference for the Shibusawa Foundation. Then we’ll go for a brief stay in Nikko (I don’t know the guy whose site I’m linking to, I just thought he had some nice pictures). And after that, we’ll spend the rest of our time in Tokyo. I’m looking forward to seeing my friend Jason again. We know each other from our time at Georgetown, and he’s now working for a law firm in Tokyo. There’s a link to his blog on your right.

We’ll be back in the US on June 28th. Maria’s bringing her laptop, and we’ll bring the digital camera. If we have the opportunity to get online, I’ll try to update the blog and post some pictures while we’re there.

Here’s a picture of Zushi I found on the web:

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Maria returned from her Japan trip last Friday, and I just got around to downloading the pictures she took on our digital camera. It was a business trip, so she didn’t spend a whole lot of time taking pictures (she was conducting interviews for a research project), but we’ve got a few to show you. Don’t worry, we’ll take more than enough pictures when we take our vacation trip to Japan in a couple of weeks!

I should explain the picture of the sign that’s written in garbled English: this sort of thing is a common sight in Japan, and it’s called “Japlish” (aka “Engrish”). In general, Japanese are very shy about trying to speak English, as they don’t want to embarass themselves by not speaking it correctly, but they seem to have no problem writing horrible English with wild abandon. Check out engrish.com for some hilarous examples.

On Thursday Maria leaves for Japan. She’ll be gone for 9 days. She’s been preparing meals and stockpiling food for Kai and I, as if we were going to be abandoned in the Alaskan tundra. But I shouldn’t tease – she’s not far off the mark in assuming that we’d otherwise subsist on pizza and canned soup. So I’m actually quite grateful!

A few days after she leaves, my brother John will arrive, and stay with Kai and I until Maria returns. He’s driving cross-country (he’s moving from Arizona to Rhode Island) and he’s driving some old truck he got for a few hundred bucks, so we’ll see if he arrives on schedule . Assuming he makes it, he’ll be a huge help – without him it would be difficult for me to go in to work without keeping Kai in daycare for an excessive number of hours each day.

Maria’s trip is a business trip. She has a number of interviews lined up with some Japanese government officials and executives from a variety of Japanese banks. She’ll be there with her friend Jen. Jen is a professor at Penn, and the two of them are doing a research project together (Maria’s “thing” is the Japanese financial system).

Maria previously envisioned going for an entire month, and taking Kai with her for the whole time. I would’ve been with them for a couple weeks, and then her mother would’ve gone for a couple weeks. But after Kai and Maria’s trip to Denver a couple months ago – when he was in a state of perpetual meltdown since he only had one parent with him – we decided to not go forward with that plan. Instead, Maria’s making this trip by herself, and then all three of us are going for two weeks in June. Maria will be in a conference for the first few days, and then she’ll join Kai and I in vacation mode.

The only thing I’m not looking forward to is the time change – it’s a 13 hour difference – essentially a complete reversal of night and day. My main concern is how Kai will deal with it, as he’s never been all that keen on sleeping to begin with. I’m thinking we might try to adjust only part way – maybe 6 or 7 hours. That way we could all stay up late every night, and then sleep late. I’m sure Kai would love night-time visits to places like Akihabara.