From A Mountain

My apologies for a delayed first post!

I arrived safely with the boys, with a few added adventures to our journey. Our flight was Boston > Toronto > Tokyo > Osaka. Snow and de-icing delayed us, and we ended up missing our final connection. We grabbed the last flight out of Tokyo to Kansai Airport in Osaka instead of Itam Airport, which meant Angela had to quickly change her plans of picking us up. Instead of a fifteen minute drive down the road, she had to race over an hour on short notice to grab us with her boss/friend from the other side of Osaka! I will actually call her now what she likes to be called, "Chako-San." While she is still Angela's "boss," she has proven such a great help and truly a blessing in our lives in so many ways - a real friend. I can't even count all the ways she has helped us and made this transition even smoother than I could imagine. We are eternally grateful. She is a true friend and already part of our Japanese family.  

So unfortunately Angela's early arrival didn't result in is having an apartment lined up. We spent the first week and a half crammed in a one bedroom apartment. Six of us (us + Angela's mom. But the end result was that she found the perfect place that went on the market the very morning that she met with the realtor. I will post pictures soon, but not until Angela has decorated and made it "home."  I promised...sorry! But it was worth the wait then and it will be for photos as well. 

Angela works for an English-speaking preschool that also teaches after school programs as well. It's less than five minutes walking from our new apartment, which is amazing since we have three little ones. It's very arts-focused, and very creative. Basically, just really awesome. You can search Facebook for "A Can B English" to follow the school, they frequently post photos and videos. The staff is also just as awesome. 

My school is called "Fun Fun Kids Afterschool." It's actually quite different from Angela's school and teaches an easier form of English in order to build a solid language foundation. They use a lot more tech (tablets), but also fun play and conversation time. Unfortunately and fortunately, the school is about two miles away. Two miles, no big deal, right? Well, each day I destroy my legs while pedaling uphill the entire way, as my school is located slightly up the side of the mountains to the north of Osaka. I make it further each time, but my legs are constantly sore. But this is also a symptom of being a car-driving American who suddenly bikes and walks everywhere, with the occasional train/bus thrown in. 

Well here we are over two weeks since I arrived with Noah and Seth. Here are a few pictures of what we've been up to. I promise much more regular posts and photos as we have home wifi now!

It was sadly in the forties for nearly the entire first week here! But we were excited to escape the thirties and snow of New England. Below is a wall in front of someone's house lined with over a hundred various cat statues. 

One of our favorite things about city living in Japan is the abundance of awesome playgrounds. Here's Noah enjoying a roller-slide. 

Here's Seth showing off a cool stick he found near the roller slide. 

Here's Seth zooming down a slide at another park close to our house. The kids actually get air when they hit the hump in the slide. 

Here's my lovely Sydney contemplating her new life in Japan. 

Of course spring will soon bring us cherry blossoms, but the rain as well. Thankfully, we are prepared!

Sydney has already started doing so many things on her own, in her independent sassy way. 

Noah braved the two mile walk to work with me the other day, and enjoyed a snack with a new friend. 

This weekend we are camping in the mountains to the north of Osaka! I was shocked to watch as a huge scout group arrived, with both boys and girls in the same uniform. As a former dorky boy scout myself, I didn't know scouts were coed internationally!

Here's our day camp group! Our trip is through Angela's school, but not all the kids came or stayed the night with us. 

Here's Seth with some friends checking out the bunk beds in our cabin. 

Here's super boss/friend Chako-san cooking part of our camp dinner - Okonomiyaki! Basically it's "what you like" (vegetables mainly with some small meat) in an egg batter fried and flipped like a pancake. Delicious!

Here's a night view of Osaka from up on the mountain! Goodnight!

So, what happened?

In short?

A lot.

I meant to type some sort of followup post after our family fell off the internet blog grid last fall. I'm sure some people were wondering if I'd just given up on the blog, or maybe something bad happened. At the end of September last year, I was full of fire and going to shoot off a dreaded rant/post. Cooler heads prevailed.

Life is a series of events - of moments. We live, we learn, we grow. We make mistakes. I believe ours was truly a mashup of all of the above.

We can so easily get lost in anger or regret, but the truth is that you can only move on - forward.
Otherwise, you're not living in the present.

We love/loved Japan. We love/loved our life there. Unfortunately, our school/work/life balance was off, and when we tried to amicably find reasonable "middle ground," it blew up in our faces. We were forced with sudden choices of relocating within Japan (jobs, apartment, kids' schools), or returning to the U.S. Given the circumstances and dwindling resources, we resentfully chose the latter. We returned to the U.S. the first week of October of last year.

FAST FORWARD.

It's March 3rd, 2015. I'm typing from the 9th floor of the Hyatt across from Logan Airport in Boston. My two energetic boys are breathing heavily and contentedly, finally consumed within the realm of dreams. It's been a journey. We worked and we saved. We weighed the options. We weighed the consequences. Tomorrow before noon, I'll be flying with my boys to our destination of Osaka, Japan. First we'll touch down in Toronto, then a transfer in Tokyo. We'll be greeted by the warm smiles and open arms of my lovely wife Angela, baby sass Sydney, and Grandma Toni (Angela's mom). The trio of girls flew out ahead of us to scout apartments close to our new jobs/new schools/new city, and to get us setup ahead of time. I stayed behind with Noah and Seth and finished up business here, and spent the last week in Connecticut with my parents, mainly eating pizza and enjoying piles of snow. We've both gotten teaching jobs, but this time at different schools. We'll be living in Minoh, which is at the northern edge of Osaka. We'll be a short train ride from Kyoto, which is our mutual favorite place on earth. We're starting a new chapter in this life, full of hope and anticipation of good things to come. Our new beginning is signaled not only by another international move, but also the impending bloom of the cherry blossoms. The beautiful harbinger of the new season.

Are we crazy? The answer is yes.

Angela inspired the name of this blog - "Living and loving in Japan." How true this title has become! The journey there and back, and now there again has been challenging. But aren't the good things in life challenging? The things that are worth keeping and worth fighting for? In Japan I have truly felt awakened - and not simply in some stereotypical spiritual sense. It's a sense of being present, this crazy thing that seems so lost in western society. It's not that the Japanese exude this characteristic - in fact they also stare lovingly at phone screens and avoid conversation regularly in transit. But the country itself, and the lifestyle are designed in ways to make you present. Sometimes, I want to give credit simply to the fact that we are bicycling or walking everywhere - that we are forced to see the trees above us, the pavement beneath our feet, and to hear the buzz of the cicada. That maybe this is all just because I haven't locked myself into a vehicle and cranked up my music to get from point A to point B.

But it's more than that.

It's a feeling of true community. Living in tight quarters and in smaller scale forces things upon people. You see your strange neighbor. You realize maybe they're not that different from you. The forced isolation of American suburbia is something we willingly accept. Get in car. Go to place. Get thing. Get back in car. Go home. Pull into automatic garage. Safe fortress.

We aren't forced to see our neighbors. We aren't forced to breath in the outside air. When we aren't forced to be uncomfortable sometimes - we are simply too comfortable. We become complacent. I'm not suggesting everyone move to Japan - but Angela and I are trying to find our place in this world,

Semi-manifesto complete. Time for me to sleep. 19+ hours minimum of travel tomorrow, pending Mother Nature's graceful cooperation. And cooperation of a 4 year old and 6 year old boy. These guys are professional fliers now. Expect regular posts containing pictures and writing soon.

Onward!