Categories
All Personal

Here we go!

I’m going to use this blog to ramble about a variety of stuff, be it whatever I’m thinking about at 1am, or what I did today, or perhaps even about work. I’m too lazy to keep a work and a home blog separate, and I’m sure that if I tried I’d end up dropping one or the other eventually.
So last night my wife and I were watching Memoirs of a Geisha. Decent movie, followed the book about as well as any movie adaptation ever does. The cool thing was that as we were watching near the end, my wife and I both said roughly simultaneously “Hey, we’ve been there!” as the screen showed a quick shot of a small street in the Gion area of Kyoto. My wife and I got engaged in Kyoto back in April 1999. That was a fun trip — she understands Japanese better than I do, but I’m a little more comfortable speaking it and we had some great round-robin conversations with people.
I’ve been to Japan a few times. I lived in Okinawa for a summer between my junior and senior years in high school, and have been to Tokyo in 1999, 2001, 2002, and 2004. Okinawa was a lot of fun, and it whetted my appetite for the Japanese culture. (Although Okinawa’s history and culture itself is quite distinctly different than that of the main part of Japan…) I studied the language and history in college, and then spent 3 years studying the language out here in Seattle. I’m not at all fluent, but I can manage to get myself around reasonably well enough. I’ve visited Tokyo for fun and for business each a few times and always had a great time. I’d love to see more than just the megapolis sometime, though. Perhaps travel to Hakone, or the Hokkaido winter festival, or down to Shikoku or Kyushu even. Someday…

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *