We Live Where We Are

Festivities

We've been saying a lot of goodbyes lately. This past weekend we had Ewan, Ian, and Andy over for a final video game night, and the weekend before we went down to Kawasaki to stay at Maria's one last time. Strangely, but not unexpectedly, the partings we've had haven't feel like finales. We're likely to see most of the friends we've made on JET again, if not regularly or in person, at least through the modern wonder of Macbook video conferencing. Andy is a fellow Marylander. Maria will be in Chicago or elsewhere, and we're already making plans to visit her when she's living with family in Sicily. Long after Ewan returns to the UK, I'm sure we'll be playing some frantic online Mario Kart. I honestly don't feel this is our last time seeing any of our ALT friends.

Our students, however, are another matter. It's been a strange process saying goodbye to them. Last week, the English club at Niko threw a big farewell party for me. The members, about 28 of them, all brought snacks and candy and drinks, we played traditional Japanese games, and then they went around in a circle and gave miniature thank-you speeches. Many of the kids even gave me gifts. Some of the girls cried. When they asked me to deliver a parting message, even I teared up, and I'm definitely no sucker for cloying sentimentality. I'm really proud of them, the ni-nensei students in particular, and proud to have been a small, but hopefully memorable part of their education.

On Friday night, the English teachers at Niko took me out to a French restaurant in Sendai. The food was delicious (apart perhaps from the half-cooked onsen egg served inside of a raw sea urchin!) and we had a good time laughing and talking. I love those instances when I'm able to connect with my coworkers on a more meaningful level than the disscusion of grammar rules. I think there's a semi-decent chance I may see some of them again in the future too. A few of them make occasional trips to the US, and I know that Juli and I will want to visit Sendai again a few years down the line.

As part of my goodbye speech to the English teachers, I told them how wonderful it is when a place where you've lived becomes a home. Sendai has definitely become a home for us. I'll miss our supermarket--the COOP--and the Italian place down the street. I'll miss the random festivals and parades of children carrying miniature shrines through our neighborhood. I'll miss hearing the bus stop outside our apartment and the bells of Juli's school tolling out the end of class. The strange volleys of fireworks on Sunday mornings, the centenarian sakura tree in the empty lot, and the music box melodies of the bottles and cans man coming down the road. I'll miss the stares I'd get from the vampiric Belarusian lady as I passed her restaurant. The mopeds whining by at 2am. Doppler effect of ambulances from the nearby hospital. I'll miss the old man near the laundromat who gave me mikan and limes, and who showed me his inventions--the light-gathering greenhouse mirror and a footpump that expells shoe odor with every step. I'll miss the curious eyes of children playing hide and seek in the candy aisle, the Hirose river after a heavy rain, the haunted shrine by the hydro-electric power station. I'll miss the hanging matsuri lanterns that line the procession up to Osaki Hachiman jinju. I'll miss the smell of okonomiyaki grease permeating my clothes. Fog obscuring the tops of apartment buildings in the distance. The billboard with it's green tea advertisements. The obscure shelving methods of English-language DVDs at Tsutaya. The delivery boy from Pizza Hut returning to our apartment thirty minutes later to give us chili-sauce packets he forgot to offer. The election vans and their white-gloved passengers spouting campaign slogans through four massive roof-mounted megaphones both early in the morning and late at night.

Okay, so maybe I won't miss that.