I’ve had my last meetings at work. Eli has had has last camps. Everything we do is tinged with the “this is the last time I’m going to do this for a year” gravitas. Which is pretty silly, since anytime you do something it could be the last time you do it for a year. Nonetheless, here we are. We have six checked bags that we are bringing with us. All of them except the ones with shoes and electronics gear are already packed. This weekend we will clean the house so our guest Eloise will not inherit our mess when she moves in on Tuesday or Wednesday. Then...Tuesday we leave.
First stop: Tokyo. We will be visiting colleagues at the University of Tokyo and Shelby and I will be giving talks. We are staying through the weekend and have lined up a sushi cooking class next Saturday and a trip to Mt. Fuji on Sunday. It will be my first time visiting Japan since I was an exchange student when I was 14. I’ve forgotten nearly all the Japanese I knew (not that I ever knew it will) except for commonly used terms like “ritual suicide” and some words that are not appropriate for a blog that might be read by Eli and his friends. But I do have some photos of me, with much more hair, that I can use to show our hosts at the University that it isn’t my first time visiting.
One of the real questions for Tokyo is whether it is possible for Eli to get sick of eating sushi. It’s his favorite food, but there is so much of it there that it seems like a case of the irresistable force vs. the immovable object.
