Hawaii Arrival
Well, I'm officially back in the US now. It's 7:15AM according to my computer, which is theoretically what time my body should think it is. On the other hand, I did kind of jerk around my sleep schedule right before I left, so who knows? I slept for about two hours on the flight here to Honolulu, and watched a movie.
It's weird being here. I mean, first of all, there are so many... white people. I want to say "foreigners", because that's... just how it works. In Japan, less than 1% of the people in any given sample will be foreign, and 80% of those people will be Chinese or Korean, so seeing a white person is fairly rare, though much more common in Kyoto (where I lived) as it's a big tourist destination.
It's a little hard to say "I lived in Kyoto" instead of the present tense "I live". It's a year of conditioning to say "京都に住んでいます", and the simple act of putting it in the past tense makes it feel really final. I think that is has made my departure sink in the most. Because of my plane-boarding failure and my six-hour layover in Hawaii, I've been slowly sort of fading out of Japan and Japanese culture on the whole. I keep apologizing to people in English, and I feel kind of ADD because I'm so used to going "OMG ENGLISH WHERE?!" that having it spoken all around me is kind of overwhelming.
And I don't have a nice way of saying this, but I never realized how much of our population is overweight. Like, I've seen the statistics. I get that. But there's a big jump from knowing a number and seeing it firsthand. While I was in Japan, seeing people that were even slightly overweight was fairly rare. At 90 kg (190 pounds) I was, at almost any given time, the largest person for half a mile. After being in a country full of short, thin people for a year, being back here where I'm short and merely average weight is very strange.
It's weird being here. I mean, first of all, there are so many... white people. I want to say "foreigners", because that's... just how it works. In Japan, less than 1% of the people in any given sample will be foreign, and 80% of those people will be Chinese or Korean, so seeing a white person is fairly rare, though much more common in Kyoto (where I lived) as it's a big tourist destination.
It's a little hard to say "I lived in Kyoto" instead of the present tense "I live". It's a year of conditioning to say "京都に住んでいます", and the simple act of putting it in the past tense makes it feel really final. I think that is has made my departure sink in the most. Because of my plane-boarding failure and my six-hour layover in Hawaii, I've been slowly sort of fading out of Japan and Japanese culture on the whole. I keep apologizing to people in English, and I feel kind of ADD because I'm so used to going "OMG ENGLISH WHERE?!" that having it spoken all around me is kind of overwhelming.
And I don't have a nice way of saying this, but I never realized how much of our population is overweight. Like, I've seen the statistics. I get that. But there's a big jump from knowing a number and seeing it firsthand. While I was in Japan, seeing people that were even slightly overweight was fairly rare. At 90 kg (190 pounds) I was, at almost any given time, the largest person for half a mile. After being in a country full of short, thin people for a year, being back here where I'm short and merely average weight is very strange.
Labels: travel
posted by William at
2/21/2009 07:12:00 AM
2 Comments:
So glad to hear you are back!
I noticed the weight thing right away, also, even without having been there as long. I almost never paid attention to weight on other people before going over to Japan, but now I notice it more because there was much less variation in weights of people over there. I still don't generally judge people by it, but I notice it a LOT more.
Hawaii was a nice transition for me because I stayed there a couple weeks since I'd never been there either, but in general there was a good mix of both English and Japanese spoken around me. I still found myself inclined to attempt to speak to people in stores in Japanese, but I only had to really stop myself a couple of times. It felt so strange, even though I thought I hadn't done as much Japanese speaking as you in your situation, I had still been there long enough that it was a habit in public places to try to use it.
SO GLAD YOU ARE BACK HOME!!!!!
I was rather freaked out in Hawaii at all the "foreigners" also.
I suppose it's not an uncommon feeling for people to have, but I'm glad to hear you say it. It was a strange sort of disorientation.
I did answer はい to people frequently in Hawaii in place of yes, and I kept trying to say excuse me/sorry to people in Japanese in the Hawaiian stores. Such a strange feeling coming back.
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