What I have noticed...

Some things that I have found:

Japanese women wear high heals all the time. It doesn't matter the weather or how much they will be walking/racing to catch a train or a light.

When they do construction, you only get to see the area until the foundation is in. Once that is up, they put tarps and scaffolding up, so we can all have a big surprise at the unveiling.

Japanese do not seem to ever get too hot or too cold. Daily, I am sweating like mad on the train, and they all look completely cozy and comfortable.

They do not smile naturally....it is just not part of their culture to smile back at you when you smile. That being said, once you get to know them, they will laugh and smile like normal. Very strange feeling to smile and not have the person smile back. They also stare a lot, but as soon as you acknowledge, they look away like they haven't spent the last 10 minutes looking directly at you or your kids.

They love blond hair. Hanna has had people come and rub her head like a Buddha belly and run off...she gets very mad, and Maya gets very freaked out.

They have every type of fish imaginable at the grocery store...shrimp with eyeballs, Octopus legs...freaks me out. Give me my salmon fillet any day, over googly eyes staring up at me from the cooler.

Japanese are quite helpful, and will actually walk you to a place if you are lost (I had this happen last week trying to get to Maya's school...out in Chofu, which is outside of Tokyo, and where there is little English spoken at the train stations).

They are crazy about germs and disease. There are more masks worn here than in any hospital I have ever been to. And, it is completely accepted as normal. Kids, adults..everyone. They even have these little animal pouches that can clip on to backpacks so the kids can have a cute storage place for their mask.

That being said, they hand out wet towels (just wet, no anti-bacterial anything on them) as a way to 'wash' your hands before you eat. AND, many bathrooms do not even have soap in them....maybe if they provided more soap, they could wear fewer masks? Seems like that would make sense, but hey, I don't know the language enough to argue. :)

Japanese love to smoke. It is almost like no one here knows that smoking can kill you....almost all restaurants are smoking, and they have smoking "stations" outside of a lot of the train station exits. For a land afraid of germs, they don't seem to mind nicotine at all!

Japanese is a VERY difficult language. I learned how to introduce myself and Scott, and say hello, good bye, are you OK? and some basic phrases today...I think my Japanese teacher thinks I am an idiot...and if she doesn't, I am sure she will soon. I ask a gazillion questions for each new phrase..that consists of maybe 5 or 6 words!! I now know why my friend Steph quit Japanese 101 in college after a month!!

Our kids, however, are picking up Japanese at a ridiculous pace. They now call oranges "micons" instead of oranges, dogs "enu" and cat "necco"...they correct me every time I speak a word they know in Japanese in English...

There are some FANTASTIC places to eat in and around where we live. We have gone to a Korean BBQ, an Indian Restaurant, an Izakaya (like a Tapas restaurant, only most everything is seafood related...except for the chicken wings!), and a Sukiyaki place, where they place a pot of boiling soy based sauce on your table and you cook thinly sliced pieces of beef, chicken,lamb and vegetables in it...and you dunk it in an raw egg yolk and eat it! Wednesday I am meeting a friend at the Rotating Sushi restaurant, where they also have mini hamburgers, french fries and cheeseburgers to go with the sushi, and Friday we are meeting up with a bunch of Stryker employees to go to a place where you fish for your own dinner and then eat it! Should be fun. :)

Because of all the restaurants, I will be needing to walk everywhere I go from now until I come home this summer!

Last week we received our boat shipment! Whahoo. We had some damaged goods (worst one, our Big screen TV was damaged in the move and does not work, so we are currently without a TV in our living room), but overall, we got everything we shipped and then some. We got our mini-trampoline, as well as my high school prom dresses...hmmm...not sure how those got taken out of the deep dark depths of the storage closet and which mover decided I needed to pack them to bring...maybe he heard me saying we had some potential formal events and thought he would help me out...but looking at the dresses and then me, he had to be able to tell I would never have fit into them!! It is so much nicer having our things though- it makes every day better and a little bit easier..so I am very thankful!!

One thing we did was find a Catholic church. I was so happy- it is one thing that is exactly the same as it was in the States. If feels good to be there, and the girls are loving Sunday school. Maya is learning a lot, especially with Lent coming up, and asking a lot of questions that I can't remember the answers to! I guess I may have to go back to Sunday school myself! :)

We also were invited to see the Superbowl at the Tokyo American Club with some friends- Denise and Andrew Hersey. It was fantastic...and fantastically weird. It was 8am, the buffet was breakfast (then turned to lunch), the drinks were OJ, tea, coffee and water, and there were no commercials, In between plays (all in English) we got to listen to the Japanese commentators...it was great just to be able to see it on big screen TVs, great reception, at the time it was actually happening. So very nice.

Because of the delivery, we have hardly made it out and about the past week. Aside from Scott going to work and my dropping off and picking up Hanna, we have been here, unpacking, shoving things under beds and throwing things away (those beautiful, 1990's circa prom dresses). So, I have no good tales to tell from the past week- no beans were thrown, no shrines were seen, and no kids turning into the devil (anymore than normal, at least!).