A man walks into a bar and asks the bartender for a glass of water. The bartender pulls out his shotgun and shoots to the right of the man, just missing him. The man says thank you, leaves a tip and walks out. Why?
After six months in my Narnian paradise, I have come to determine the fundamental flaw of living in another country: a lack of American food.
This is not to say that I wouldn't have the same complaint about missing Coco Ichibanya while in America (actually, there isn't one in Tahara so I don't have to go that far to miss it). And it's not to suggest I don't like Japanese food (I even love raw octopus now, as long as I don't look at it while I'm eating it). But all the food I've been used to eating for the past...22 years is all currently out of reach.
I can see a few people staring now thinking, "He doesn't update his blog for four months and he comes back with a complaint about food?"
And I'll continue, before I was RUDELY interrupted, to complain about even my ability to make American food. Did you know Japan doesn't sell breadcrumbs? And sometimes the eggs in the refrigerator section were already cooked? That's the last time I try to make meatloaf!
What can I say? What was once new and exotic has become routine. I am still having a blast. I have become (relatively) proficient in Japanese. I have a fun, interesting and easy job and I'm still able to aggressively save money...but, to be honest, the intended subject of this blog was to be my trials and tribulations. There haven't been any.
I started this journey in August, but truthfully it was January of 2010 when I began aggressively looking for a job teaching in Japan. And even at that time, as optimistic as I always was, it seemed like a long shot. But I knew that I could not be satisfied with a normal job or a normal life.
Needless to say, this job and the ease of my current life have caused me to reassess my definition of 'normal.'
I do have a normal life. I pay bills, meet people, learn new things, work hard at a job I love and sometimes go sightseeing. Japan, at the end of the day, is a normal country with a fascinating history and culture.
And yet, I know I am seeing something that most people won't ever see, a world that is completely different and alien to the one they've known all their lives. My life isn't particularly interesting, my complaints are rather mediocre and I could not imagine myself being anywhere else, even if someone bribed me with Chipotle!
At the end of the day, it's not where I am that makes this a new adventure. It's the challenge I took. I chose this path because I knew it was not easy (and that the stage I am at is actually the easiest part of my challenge). I knew it would be nearly impossible to achieve many of the goals I set for myself (though I haven't failed at one yet). I suffer through my lack of home cooking and Saratoga pizza to prove the most important American ideal: that if you work hard enough you can achieve anything. Too often now, that maxim has only been used to achieve conventional dreams.
Where, exactly, is the fun in that?
The man had the hiccups. (Ok, I stole it from a recent episode of NCIS! I didn't want to end on such a dramatic note.)
