A little story about a girl I know...

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, a girl from small town Canada found herself far from home in a strange land where people did things very differently.  At first, she couldn't understand a word of what they were saying to her, but gradually she learned to string a few words together and could start to put together sentences and grasp little nuances here and there of what conversations were about.  Gestures and pointing proved very helpful ... and of course, smiling.  She was lucky enough to find herself in a family with a big brother who took her to interesting places and introduced her to his friends that spoke English and could read her stories like Winnie the Pooh, and who took her on road trips out of Tokyo to the forests that she missed so much from home.  And she was lucky to have a Mom who was kind of wacky, who worked from home and was always busy and who cared for her just like her real mother did.  She loved that living in another country made her hyper aware of her surroundings - everything was so fascinating.  She missed her family (and her dog, Fred) terribly.  She wrote many, many letters home (well, especially at first.  They did unfortunately dwindle off as she got more used to the place).  (These letters would be kept in a safe place for many, many years until she was home visiting one summer and had to go through them to decide which ones to keep.  Those then went into a box that went onto a ship that transported them to her new home.  Oh, but now I am getting way ahead of myself.)

When this girl was finally able to go back "home" she realised that she had left part of herself behind (and we aren't just talking about the boyfriend!).  For now in her heart, she carried two countries and life would never be the same.  When she went off to university, she found herself back learning more about that part of the world that she had visited and when she graduated, two kind gentlemen came from Japan and offered her a job teaching English at their company.  (It should probably be mentioned at this point that the local office of this company took her and the other new English-teaching employee from her university town out to dinner and this was the first time she ever heard of - and actually tried! - blowfish.  For those of you who still remain in the dark about this expensive delicacy, fugu or blowfish is a poisonous fish which can cause paralysis or death if not prepared in the right way.  The secret is in the liver where it keeps all the poison, but this knowledge will come later).

The second time she visited the strange land, it didn't seem so strange anymore.  She was reunited with the family that had looked after her (after 6 years!!), and she could go to Harajuku shopping again, anytime she wanted to (although this time she felt too old).  This was something she had dreamed about in those intervening years in high school.  Many things were natsukashii (happy memories from her past), but she was also able to be more adventurous now that she was older.  This time she travelled and learned to cook some Japanese food and how to sing lovely Japanese songs at karaoke bars with her students.  She bought a stereo by haggling in Akihabara and spent many a light night in Roppongi, occasionally missing the last train home.  She did crazy things on the train while drunk.  In sum, while she learned a lot more about Japanese culture and could speak more of the language (with 4 years of university Japanese under her belt), she was still far from being Japanese.

After a year, the girl returned home again.  This time, she was ready for a little adventure.  Having lived all of her life on the very, very Western edge of Canada (right at the water's edge, almost ready to fall off!), she realised that if she truly wanted to call herself Canadian, she should really experience a Canadian winter.  After all, most of the world seems to have an image of Canada as a snow-locked, cold northern country, so being from the west coast where it hardly ever snows or gets cold (although it does rain sometimes), it was time for a bit of exploration.  Her boyfriend at the time was going to school in Toronto, and that seemed like a good place to start.  So she moved halfway across the country and ended up in a small basement suite in Parkdale, just south of the King Street tramline and a short walk away from one of Canada's Great Lakes (which she kept forgetting wasn't the sea, having always lived with the ocean close by.  Really, this lake was so big, it was deceiving.  It really could have been the sea!).

She worked for a while, and then quit in a very traumatic manner.  She wandered for a while, lost, then found some odd jobs and decided to go back to school.  Well, it turned out that this school had an exchange programme with several other schools.  Not only with a university in Japan, which she wasn't really interested in, having been there and done that (and figuring she could probably figure out a way to do it again on her own), she applied to go to the Netherlands, Spain and Sweden.  And thus it was that in the fall of her second year at the school, she found herself in Copenhagen Airport, with a 10-day Eurail pass in hand, looking for a youth hostel to spend the night at.  If you can believe it, the information desk sent her to one with a bowl of condoms at the registration desk that turned out to be a gym with little partitions around sets of 2 bunk beds with huge gym style toilets for showering and washing up in the morning.  Suffice it to say that that was a bit too much for this small town girl (who was carrying all of her Most Important Possessions for the next two months in two rather large suitcases!) and she hightailed it to a hotel.  The next 10 days were spent wandering around discovering the world by herself and included several train rides, a meeting with the head of the Japan Socialist Party at the top of a mountain in Norway, a boat ride on a fjord, and an overnight sleep on a cruise ship where she met the lovelist retired couple from Florida.  It also involved a brief stop in Hell (Norway) where there was just enough time to get off the train and take a picture at the little station.  In Oslo, she saw a very old wooden Viking ship that had been very carefully dredged up from the harbour and preserved, and she visited the Munch Museum!  It was all very exciting and those 10 days of adventure may just be the very moment in time when she caught the travel bug.  Something that would likely affect her for the rest of her days.

*okay, now this is getting long, so I think I will stop here and continue another day*
*I don't want to bore you, dear Reader!*

 

*to be continued*

 

(oh, I have always wanted to do that!)