life after Japan

After 2 months gorging on an endless smorgasbord of experiences in Japan I have a challenge: to create newsworthy posts from the raw material of my quiet, Vaulnaveys life…

I confess I’ve been putting energy into maintaining the Japanese connection: emailing and Facebooking with whoever of my Japanese friends will indulge me in cyberspace: looking at snowy photos of the Morimoto fields; learning that, sadly, Kayo’s baby boy suffered brain damage at birth; that there has been a significant, but not-internationally-newsworthy earthquake not far from Tokyo… And the stream of woofers to both the Kashimo and Hongo households continues unabated – I’m aware of how very transient indeed my presence there was.

Meanwhile, chez moi, inspired by how well I felt on the Japanese diet, I have adopted a brown-rice régime, delighted to find most Japanese ingredients readily available in Grenoble. Last weekend Juan kindly allowed me to feed him a rice/nori paste/umeboshi/sesame-oil-and-shoyu basic dish, along with miso soup (my precious supply of miso from the Tokyo market, as different from the nasty jarred item sold in Europe as you can imagine). We ate the miso soup in the lacquer bowls painted by a craftsman friend of Shigeo and Keiko’s; the Côtes du Rhône wine adding a je ne sais quoi to the meal.

I have struck up a friendship with a lovely Japanese woman from my local networking group, lunching with her in a Japanese café that I hadn’t noticed before. And, if it wasn’t the night before going away again, I could go to a concert of Japanese music organized by the Grenoble Japan Association (who also run a language class) this Friday evening. So opportunities abound.

But, in need of a bit of structure in my life, I have decided – as from this morning – to begin the day, as I had at the Morimotos: cleaning the toilet! Fervant in my desire to live in a clean and ordered house.

But this is all daft, I know that. What’s it all about… I don't know. But I will have to pick up that thread from 2015 because on Saturday I will be travelling even further than Japan - this time  westwards: Juan has carved some time for himself, from his company, Schott... and we are going to Chile for Christmas, and a holiday of landscapes and (hopefully) botanic wonders.