Sharing Japan

Posted on by Caroline
I’m sitting here in our hotel room, watching the early morning light grow over the Tokyo rooftops in Akasaka. In a few hours we’ll all go with Meg and Kate to the Haneda airport to send them on their way back to their life in France. It’s been so much fun to witness Guam and Japan through their eyes and share our life with them. I feel like we’ve made the most of it. We really only had enough time to give them the teaser tour of Japan - a few World Heritage shrines in Kyoto, a little shopping in Tokyo, and we ended the tour at The Making of Harry Potter outside Tokyo yesterday. It was the first time...Read More

Best Laid Plans

Posted on by Caroline
We had a plan for Meg and Kate’s visit: a day in Tokyo to meet them, a couple days in the tourist hotel in Guam to introduce them to the island, a few days in our house to show them our daily life, and then back to Japan to see Kyoto and then visit The Making of Harry Potter before sending them back on their way home to France. But life has a sense of humor, and all our plans were thrown into disarray when illness joined the party and proceeded to tear through the house, felling Dike, Kate and Amelia in rapid succession. So we lost three days to illness and then a slow recovery. And sometimes I wonder…...Read More

An afternoon in Tokyo

Posted on by Caroline
I apologize in advance for the quick post… We had a fabulous day yesterday. After meeting Meg and Kate at the airport, we took them back to our hotel in Ueno so they could drop off their bags, and recover from the long bit of traveling they’ve already done. Then the goal was to get them as much sunshine and fresh air as possible. I imagined a slow leisurely day of strolling through Tokyo neighborhoods. Amelia imagined a trip to Shibuya and the Pokémon and Nintendo stores there. …So we chose to go to Shibuya. Which is an absolutely amazing place. And if you want to supercharge your entry into all things modern Japan, the perfect place. Although I’m still...Read More

Visitors!!!

Posted on by Caroline
We’ve had a few visitors to come see us here in Guam, but it’s been a little while. Guam feels far away from absolutely everything, and no one is ever ‘just in the neighborhood’, so we don’t expect visitors. But today the four of us will head to the airport, while on the other side of the world, my sister and niece will start their journey from France. If all goes to plan, we’ll meet up in the Haneda airport tomorrow morning, and we’ll start a two week visit together. I’m so excited! We’ll start in Tokyo, but just long enough to let them catch their breaths and start to recover from jetlag, before we continue on to Guam. We’ll...Read More

The Monster Slide

Posted on by Caroline
Yesterday felt like a gift of a day. We really didn’t have much on the agenda that we had to do, so we just took our time wandering around the city. So often, traveling devolves into a list of things you have to see and not quite enough time to see it all. And so you dash from place to place as efficiently as possible. And I truly believe that in by dashing, you lose the soul of the place. Yesterday we had some extra time and decided to go find a park and playground nearby. I turned the phone over to Amelia and let her navigate us to the park. I kept wanting to take control back, but I...Read More

Back in Tokyo

Posted on by Caroline
I’m back in Tokyo - this time with Amelia and Duke. Tim will join us tomorrow. One of Tim’s cousins graciously invited us to have dinner at her place, so that’s the primary motivator to go this week. But it’s also been far too long since we’ve played our adventure song, and we’ve been looking forward to our next trip. Aside from dinner on Tuesday, we don’t have too much time and we also don’t have too much on the agenda. Tuesday morning I’ll take the kids back to the custom notebook store, and I’ll take Tim back to the izakiya that’s around the corner. Aside from that we might go to an aquarium and a Pokémon Center and hopefully...Read More

A Stationery Store Pilgramage

Posted on by Caroline
It’s been a strange season - I think we’re transitioning to the taxi-driver phase of parenting. The kids are enrolled in surfing and soccer and cross country. And I can’t even remember how long it’s been since all four of us have been healthy at the same time. But on a positive note, our school year has been off to a great start. All the habits and skills that we’ve been working on have all clicked into place and we’ve been humming along and (generally) having fun. But…. It’s been two and a half months since we’ve been off island and I’ve been getting itchy feet. So we hatched a plan to make a quick jaunt to Tokyo. The plan...Read More

Oxford Experience

Posted on by Caroline
We’re on our way now to Ireland, for a very brief stop-over before we continue west to Denver to meet back up with the kids. Our time in Oxford has been lovely. I got up early yesterday to take some photos around town before the streets got mobbed by hordes of other tourists and the sun retreated behind clouds. Then our class went out on a field trip to visit churches and apparently abandoned (but not really?) villages dating back to the era of the Black Death. Here a few photos worth making particular note of… First, there’s one particular door on an alley next to University Church. The spot in front of this door is where (according to legend),...Read More

First Day

Posted on by Caroline
We finished our first day as Oxford summer students and everything has been just as amazing as we’d hoped it would be. We’ve had three meals in the Christ Church Hall so far and we’ve met an incredibly diverse group of fascinating people. They’ve hailed from Orkney to Florida, from Aix en Provence to Pakistan. All with rich life stories and an abundance of curiosity and intelligence. My tutor for The Black Death course is perfect. We’re covering a lot of detailed information and I can’t keep up as I try to write down the references to books and historians and historic figures and events. But he has a sense of humor. Anyone who acknowledges the dearth of good coffee...Read More

Cambridge

Posted on by Caroline
We arrived at Heathrow yesterday morning around 9 and found our bus out to Cambridge. Wandering around Cambridge was a surreal, dream-like experience. My mental map of the town is wobbly, so I couldn’t predict what would be around every corner, but every new turn brought back a wave of happy memories and dimly remembered emotions. We realized how much of our early days were centered on trying and loving various restaurants around town. We just made it in time to put an order of Yippee Noodle’s incomparable salty squid. After renewing our faith in salty squid, we walked around the various colleges in town and then walked out to see Tim’s old apartment in Chesterton. Altogether, we covered about...Read More