FINDING YOUR WAY

I participated in Sheila Delgado's September challenge.
Here are some of the pieces I did for the daily challenges.

"Each of us comes from somewhere with blossoms."  Victoria Chang

Victoria Chang's thoughtful idea graced the back cover of Poetry Magazine recently. Reading the sentence reminded me of our move to Toyko. We joined with numerous expats from all over the world in a city crammed with over 21 million people. Bill's company gave us lots of move-in information, but the best was a booklet titled "Bloom Where You Are Planted." Most of the expats, like us, stayed only for three or four years and moved on to another expat assignment, while a few put down roots that went deep into the Japanese soil. In either case, a move out of our own country changed and challenged us.

In the first few weeks after moving to Tokyo, we spent almost every day walking our neighborhood, trying out the subways, and looking for something familiar. We lived in Minami Azabu, a district near the center of Tokyo where many expats lived. National Azabu, the local grocery store carried some Western products such as muesli, but many Americans shopped through the Foreign Buyers Club, an early delivery service, to acquire flour, American cereals, and Pop-Tarts. On nearby Hiroo Shopping Street, we found La Jolla, a Mexican restaurant that gave our son something familiar. The staff embraced him with joy. We slowly found other places that became our go-to places, a creperie on a back street off of Omotesando, an elegant tree-lined shopping street near Meiji Shrine, an Italian restaurant around the corner from our apartment, a cafe with dense hot chocolate, much better than the kind we made at home, and Itoya, with its bookstore and floors filled with an array of art materials and office supplies. Those simple connections to our previous life allowed us to step into a world we grew to love, and which challenged our beliefs and values.

Traditional Japan

Learning the language became the biggest hurdle in Tokyo. We came from a country with a language based on the Roman alphabet with 26 letters. We faced a language with 2136 characters in daily use and drawn with a brush, read mainly vertically instead of horizontally, and based on Chinese kanji symbols. We lost our literacy when we arrived as we tried to decipher signage and documents written in kanji and the two other Japanese alphabets (hiragana and katakana). Nothing was familiar. We began to understand how difficult it is for someone to move permanently to another country while trying to learn a different language and culture. An expat has choices: to hide from the overwhelming, to grow bitter, or to embrace the challenge of learning and adapting to a new life and new standards. During our learning curve, we went through all of those phases.

When we returned permanently to the United States after almost six years in two different countries, our son, who was entering high school, said, "I wouldn't be the same person that I am if I had stayed in Danville."

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September Window View

While diving down a Rabbit Hole on the Internet, I found this intriguing challenge, which offers activities close to water in the winter. Bodies of water are appealing to me and I find it calming to be near the ocean. Does water have the same effect on you?

Blue Mind Challenge:

https://www.bluetonic.org.uk/winterchallenge