We’re back at home in California. We were away in Osaka, Japan for two years, nearly to the day. Is re-entry hard? Yeah. It is. The kids miss their friends in Japan. John is feeling some pressure to find a new job. I am trying to unpack everything that was in storage and figure out where it all goes. Even the cats are skittish. We sold a bunch of our furniture so at the moment there’s only one La-Z-Boy recliner that we are all fighting over, and usually the cat is already curled up there. John is mad at rude drivers in California. Driving here means you’ll be run over or run off the road if you don’t keep up…
Sayonara Japan!
The Crazy Last Day I woke up at 6am on Wednesday, August 1. Today is departure day. First thing is to feed the cats and hope they use the kitty litter box before we leave the house. They get to fly in the cabin with us again so puh-leeeze kitties, no mess on the airplane! Other last things on today’s to do list: Osaka Gas will come to shut off the gas and give us our final bill – between 9-10 am. It’s a relief to close our account before we leave. Our friend Chiharu will come at 9:15 am to pick up Halyard’s twin mattress so that it can be thrown away at her house – she has “big…
The Last Days
Aahhh Japan, we had so much fun. It’s sad to leave. My kids want to stay another year. Avalon loves the school friends she made here. Kaiyo loves having only 27 kids in his entire grade. Halyard loves the freedom and independence that Japan’s safe living affords us. And I love the ability to live without a car and instead walk, bike, bus and train everywhere. It means the kids don’t rely on us to drive them somewhere and they don’t have to accommodate to my schedule. I started teaching more English in the last year and I probably could have built that up more if we stayed. But here’s the thing. I learned that the California public university system…
Mou-ichido Hokkaido
Omikuji! Omikuji are fortune-telling strips of paper that can be found at temples and shrines throughout Japan. Most of the time they’re only in Japanese so we just walk past them. But when I was at Hokkaido Shrine last spring, my cousin said they have them in English and we should both get one. In this photo I’ve paid my 100 yen “donation” and I’m picking out a fortune from the box. The fortunes range from great blessing/luck to great curse. Here’s what the website www.japan-talk.com says about omikuji: “The omikuji will go on to break down your fortune in health, love, marriage, business, childbirth, disputes, studies, travel, finding lost articles and achieving your desires. These will generally follow the…
Osaka Earthquake
Today, Monday June 18, our house shook at 7:58 am. It was quite a jolt. The kids were getting ready for school and Avalon was finishing up some last minute homework at the table when the ground starting rumbling and the house started shaking and I started panicking. It was the strongest, scariest earthquake I have ever felt. That’s saying something because I’m from California and I’ve felt my share of earthquakes. But as it turned out, we were one of three cities that felt it the strongest. We live right next to the center! That’s never happened. The epicenter was in Takatsuki where I work every Tuesday. The neighboring city, Ibaraki, also got a lot of damage and that’s…
Japanese Winter
Subtitle: This is no way to live. The average temperature over the past week has been around 4 degrees Celsius. That’s 39 degrees F. It was negative degrees C the other day. I feel like I’m living inside an ice cube. Finally it snowed today, Saturday, January 27. If it’s going to be ice cold outside I prefer that it snows so at least it’s a beautiful sight and there’s the possibility of a snowball fight or snowman to be made. Old timers at my kids’ school are telling me that this is the coldest winter in Osaka they’ve ever experienced. Japan can be beautiful in winter but let’s be honest, my California self can’t take this cold.Japanese houses are…
Okinawa stories and photos
My prior post detailing my trip to Okinawa started to get a bit long and wordy so I had to cut it off. Here are more sights and stories from Japan’s famous island to the south. I landed at Naha Airport in the early evening. By the time I traveled from the airport to my Airbnb apartment and got settled in, it was dark. On the main street, Kokusai-dori, brightly lit stores were crowded with high school students, marathon runners and foreign tourists. It was raining lightly so everyone was trying to duck out of the drizzle. Locals were everywhere, luring visitors to their stores, hawking t-shirts, keychains, Okinawa treats, restaurants menus, drinks and even two Owl Cafes along the…
Typhoon Lan Arrives
We arrived in Japan from sunny, coastal Southern California, where the weather is almost always perfect and the sun shines without humidity and the sky is blue and the air smells like the ocean. We looked forward to experiencing four seasons in Japan. My kids had never lived anywhere with real changing seasons and my husband who is from Chicago missed them. In the past year we’ve seen sights that we’ve never seen at our house in California. Fire red autumn leaves on the trees, snow falling outside our front door, cherry blossoms bursting on branches like popcorn, and a whole lot of torrential rain and gusty wind. I’ve never needed an umbrella so often in my life. And that…
Toilets in Japan
I’m finally writing my toilet post. We’ve been here a year now so I’ve been thinking about it that long. Gomen nasai (sorry), but I’ve got a year’s worth of thoughts to write about. There’s just too much to say about toilets/sinks/bathrooms in Japan. There are two kinds of toilets in the ladies room here: Japanese toilets and Western toilets. Maybe Asian toilets are not a surprise to some people. But they were a surprise to me when we vacationed in Japan in 2013. A lot of people told me beforehand that I should always carry a pack of tissues with me just in case I needed them in the public bathrooms. That advice was drilled into me as a…
Our 2nd Year House
Oh wow. This microscopic kitchen looks like something out of House Hunters International on HGTV. We have ARRIVED. We even have a dishwasher, something that every international house hunter was predominately preoccupied with. It seems that most people (who are featured on TV anyway) do not like to wash their dishes by hand anymore. In my opinion, it’s much more important to have a reliable clothes dryer. Now we live in an area called Onoharahigashi (Oh-no-ha-ra-he-ga-she). It’s actually Onohara and higashi means east. We are just down the street aways from the kids’ school, which is in Onoharanishi (Oh-no-ha-ra-knee-she). Nishi means west, so the school is in Onohara west. Nearby there is also Onoharaminami (Oh-no-ha-ra-me-nah-me) and minami means south. Kita…