We returned from our 3 week holiday in Tokyo over 2 weeks ago, but I haven’t felt sane or rested enough to write until now.  I felt a little like I needed a vacation from our vacation, especially since our door-to-door travel time from our friends’ house in Tokyo to our house in Grenada was a whopping 45 hours.

In case you are interested, our house sitter left the place as neat as a pin (almost putting me to shame) and the cats were happy.  So he is aces in our book.

My husband had this very perfect thing to say about the country of Japan:

Japan was/is weird, interesting, frustrating, cool, not cool, hot, humid, historic, futuristic, organized, clean, polite, off-putting, easy to get around in and yet difficult to navigate, expensive, and far.

I concur wholeheartedly with his estimation.

I’m still wrapping my head around the whole trip, so I can’t really give you a full picture of it all quite yet.  But I will start giving you links to our photos at least.

Soon.  Very, very soon.

What I CAN say about Japan, is that it is completely similar to and different than anyplace I’ve ever been.  Like New York City, it has lots of tall buildings, a large underground subway system, millions of people, interesting food, and tons of things to do and see.

Unlike some places I have been, a very small portion of the population speaks any English, many things are how they are without any reason that I could discern, especially since I didn’t meet any Japanese folks I could hold a conversation with (due both to my minuscule knowledge of Japanese, and their lack of English).  Do you understand?  Maybe not, and I’m not quite sure I did/do either.  I’m still processing it all.

The hardest part of the trip for me was that I wasn’t able to interact with that many Japanese people.  Other than drinking and eating local foods and beverages, I like to ask lots and lots and LOTS of questions about the places I go and the people I see.  Our friend Chris, who is massively fluent in Japanese, could offer his take on any situation.  But since he isn’t a permanent resident of Japan (and more importantly, he is not Japanese), there are still assumptions and guesses that he has to throw into the mix of explanations that he gave me about things.  I’m sure that my questions of “Why This?” and “Why That?” must have gotten boring, but he was–as always–a very patient and competent tour guide, as well as were his wife Beth and their son Max. They let us take over their lives for 3 whole weeks, and we hope they aren’t worse for the wear.

Spending time with our friends was the centerpiece of the trip, since we don’t get to see them as often as we’d like, but it’s always lovely to spend time with them when we can.  The only drawback was that since Max is only about 18 months old, we’re pretty sure he’ll forget what good buddies he became with Breck and I this summer.  But these things tend to happen when hanging out with a toddler.