Tomorrow morning (Thursday the 19th), my wife, son and daughter and I are heading out for a trip to visit my younger sister, husband, two nephews and niece. They live in Tokyo, Japan.
We’ve been planning this trip since last August, when my sister announced that she and her family were moving to Tokyo. My sister speaks fluent Japanese and previously lived there for seven years. My brother-in-law is Japanese, and the three kids, all under 7 years-old, speak both English and Japanese. When she was pitched this opportunity to move back and have her kids closer to their other grandparents for a while, she couldn’t turn it down. She works for a subsidiary of China.com that makes ERP software. They were having challenges in their Tokyo office and needed her help.
We couldn’t pass up the opportunity to go to Japan with a place to stay and built-in tour guides. A few years back, when my wife’s sister lived in Paris, we packed the kids up and went to visit. This time, we’re going to spend about five days in Tokyo, then take the bullet train to Hiroshima to see the Peace Museum and to Kyoto for all the old temples, and then, believe it or not, go to Tokyo Disneyland for two days.
We leave St. Louis at 7:15am tomorrow morning and connect in Houston for a 13 ½ hour flight to Tokyo. So – when most of you wake up tomorrow morning, my family and I will already be heading to the airport, and, when you go to bed, we’ll still be on the airplane to Tokyo.
It should be pretty cool. I have listed to sixteen 30-minute Japanese lessons in my car. At minimum, I can order beer and sake very clearly! I can also ask people if they understand English. That’s probably sufficient.
I should be able to log in from my sister’s apartment over there and, if I can, I will post some updates and thoughts on what we see.
じゃまた
This reads “ja mata,” which means “see you later.”
