Two weeks in Japan...
And no major disasters. Lots of minor ones, though. For instance, earlier this evening, I ran out to the local convenience store to buy milk. This has become something of a nightly ritual because milk is only sold around here in 1000 ml (about a quart) containers. The Japanese don't seem to drink nearly as much milk as Americans drink -- either lactose intolerance or an aversion to cow boobies, I don't know which, but the point is we go through a significantly larger quantity of milk than Japanese families of our size (assuming there actually ARE Japanese families of our size).
Anyway, I'm going out to buy milk at the Community Store, only to discover that the Low Fat brand I usually buy is gone. So I get the slightly more expensive brand that is always next to our old, reliable Low Fat. This milk is in Japanese. I don’t read Japanese. The guy at the counter talks at me, slightly longer than he usually does. As I also don't speak Japanese, I suppose he's just making small talk since he's beginning to recognize me as one of the regulars. I begin to feel like I'm part of the community; I feel good about the progress that I've made living in Japan for two weeks.
I was wrong. I wish I read Japanese. I wish I spoke Japanese. Had I either of these two skills, I would have been alerted to the fact that I was paying six bucks for a particularly hideous two quarts of putrefied yoghurt drink. We discovered my mistake when our eleven-year old tried to sneak a bowl of her mom's very-expensive-you-kids-eat-the-Frosted-Flakes imported Italian granola. The lowest point came a few minutes later, when one of the six-year-olds caught me at the kitchen sink furtively rinsing nasty yoghurt-cheese-milk from increasingly less imported granola. "Mom," she hollers through the house, "Dad's being Dutch again!"
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