It’s funny how your perceptions of home change after a long trip. We’ve been back almost a year now, but St. Louis still somehow looks different to me than I remember.
Things I will miss about Tokyo, in no particular order:
- Warm robotic toilets.
- Seeing people everywhere.
- Convenient trains.
- Cheap take-away sushi
- The supermarket.
- The convenience stores.
- The vending machines.
- Friendly people, all of whom are utterly dedicated to doing their job right.
Things I won’t miss about Tokyo:
- Squat toilets.
- Seeing people everywhere.
- The smog.
- The single-ply toilet paper (just who are they fooling?)
- Expensive coffee.
- The language barrier.
- The fact that we would never, ever be accepted as a member of society.
Things I’ve discovered about St. Louis in virtue of having been away:
- St. Louis is empty, going on deserted.
- The trains here are small, infrequent, slow, and inconvenient, but at least we have them.
- Americans can be surprisingly and frequently rude and obnoxious—much more so than I realized.
- That the seafood aisle is desperately short of fish with any sort of flavor, but that otherwise the international grocers here stock nearly everything we’d begun to take for granted in Tokyo.
- America is freaking huge.
- Americans realize, rightly, that there is more to drinking than simply beer and sake.
