The end of the rainy season, and various other musings

I've never noticed it in the past, but then again that might be because the past "rainy seasons" were vast disappointments. This year is the first year that the season lived up to its name with nearly non-stop daily rain showers. In any case, after the rainy season ended, the worst part of the East-Asian summer disappeared with the rain: the humidity!

I went to Beijing with Nina last month, and it was amazing! One of my favorite things about it, though, was the weather; it was quite hot, but not humid. Now, Japan's got a similar thing going on, and it is so nice! Anyways, Beijing was such a blast.. very cheap, the food was indescribably delicious (and with huge American-sized portions, not like the tiny amounts they give you here in Ye Olde Nippon), and it was quite foreign.

Foreign... that's a weird thing to enjoy about a place, I suppose? But when you're living abroad and you get comfortable, things stop feeling foreign. The Japanese lifestyle has in many ways become normal for me. Now of course, here in my apartment is a little piece of America, where I do things mostly American style (although I do still always take my shoes off as I enter.)

So for me to visit China, I got a refreshing blast of "oh wow a foreign country" again! It was really fun and super interesting to visit the capital city of China, since it has such a deep culture that goes back from forever ago and is likely shaping up to be America's chief rival in the coming century. That is, if America isn't in the descendant and actually will lose our superpower status...

In any case, I'm still sort of surprised about all the conflict I'm reading about back home. It seems like Americans are forever going to be in two camps, Conservative and Liberal, Republican and Democrat, and we're never going to get anything done without about half the country completely pissed off and making threats of impeachment. If anything, this would indicate to me that our power isn't going to remain what it was in the previous century.

Not that that's necessarily a bad thing. Without a global threat like the USSR (which was bad because it was an aggressive authoritarian regime that wouldn't hesitate to use military force to expand its territory, not because it was supposedly "communist"), I feel like America as a superpower causes more harm than good. We alienate the rest of the world with our unilateralist policies, and often mettle in countries that frankly we have no business in. And the whole idea of a "preemptive war" that was Bush's justification for invading Iraq... well that scares me to my very core.

Regardless, I really enjoyed my trip to China and so decided to start trying to save more of my paycheck while in Japan and spend it on a few more trips abroad (well, abroad from where I'm living) before I leave East Asia and the same trips would quadruple in price and time necessary. I'm off to South Korea with my friend Jake in about two weeks, then we'll come back and both finally go take a look out Tokyo-way. A week after that I'll climb Mt. Fuji! Then, yet another week later, Nina and I will take an as yet undetermined trip abroad. (Maybe Taiwan?)

Speaking of Taiwan, I noticed a very interesting thing while I was at the airport in Beijing. It was a huge, brand new international airport that had just begun operations and was very impressive... and I noticed on the signs when we were boarding our return flight: "Domestic Flights" on one sign, and "International Flights, Taiwan, Hong Kong" on another sign. If you're familiar with the politics at play, then you might share in my amusement at this clever bit of propaganda.

All in all, I can't express how much I've loved working here in Japan, and am very sad to think that in a few short months I'll be leaving it all behind. Nonetheless, my experience has been a bit unique and I'm quite thankful for my job at the Multimedia Center of my company, where I've taught on web-cam instead of face-to-face. Lessons are a lot more enjoyable in-person, but the best part of the Multimedia Center is that all of my co-workers are from all parts of the world.

It is like a cosmopolitan crash course: I now know appropriate cultural jokes, references, and slang for New Zealand, Australia, Wales, England, Scotland, and Ireland. I can also mutter a few jokes in Mandarin, greet people naturally in French, can fake a pretty convincing Italian accent, have had many chances to butcher my high school Spanish, and I've even learned about exotic foreign cuisine! (A bit close to home, that one; surprising that I hadn't heard of it before. Then again, I'm from West Virginia... maybe not so surprising.)

The opportunities and experiences I've had here in such a diverse office has really been worth my time, and I can walk away from this without feeling like I wasted three years of my life. That is something I was worried about at first, but I now feel quite content with my decision and so happy that things worked out well.

I can almost taste that Thanksgiving Dinner.