Baka na gaijin!

That is the name Tyler gave me on our first night here in Japan. He has taken 3 years of Japanese at SFHS so I am the only one of the four of us who knows pretty much no Japanese. However, I am learning a bit. Baka na gaijin means "stupid foreigner". Nice name for a kid to give his mom, huh? Actually it is a name all in fun. It started on the very first train we got on. We had been in the air for 14 hours, mind you. I was tired and we still had a way to go to get settled into our hotel. On the train everyone was well behaved and minding their own business when we speedily passed another train going the opposite direction. Holy cow! It made a huge noise and scared the bejeebies out of me! When something scares the bejeebies out of me a scream also comes out of me and that is what happened at that moment! How embarassing! It woke up anyone who happened to be sleeping on the train. One older gentleman seemed to really get a kick out of it. I felt pretty stupid and I was quite tired so I got doing the laughing/crying thing that I thought was going to get out of control and cause even more of a scene. I know at least one guy went home and talked about the baka na gaijin on the train!

Yesterday we were in the electronic district, (Akihabara). I got me a new camera. I am trying to learn things to do with it and I will try to post some pics and video when I get a minute. The instructions are all in kanji so it's a bit hard to learn by reading it. It will have to be trial and error on this one.

Tom and I were worn out and stuck close to the hotel yesterday evening but the boys had lots of energy and Cam seems to know what he is doing around here so they took off to have some fun of their own. It was a little nerve racking waiting for them to come back to the hotel. They finally did at about 11:30. Waiting up for the kids even while on vacation.....

Tom and I went out for our morning run around the Emporer's Castle again this morning. I went around once, he went out for a second lap. I love the "ohayo gozaimasu" greeting we get from many of the local people! We are loving it here! Thank you to everyone who is making it possible for us to be here without worry of things back in good ole' Spanish Fork!