Nihon e Yokoso

Welcome to Japan!

Well, not so much you…but me.

Mark, Noah and I left Hong Kong on Friday, March 21st for Japan, where we will be staying for the next 22 days. We had a relatively uneventful trip (which is considered a good thing these days). We’ve been trying, with moderate success, to prepare Noah for the trip for weeks now by letting him know that we were going to Tokyo. But so far his idea of Tokyo is of a land of food and lost items. Such as:

Me: “Hey Noah, do you know where we’re going tomorrow?”
Noah: “We go to The Tokyo and eat banana eggs.”

or

Me: “Dude, get your stinkin’ hands off my camera. That’s a mommy camera. It’s not a baby camera.”
Noah: “Where’s my baby camera? I don’t know. Maybe it’s in The Tokyo.”

It was already late in the evening as the plane neared the end of the four-hour journey to Narita Airport. As it made its descent to the airport, one thing could be heard loud and clear throughout the cabin — Noah, looking down at Japan from his cushy window seat and yelling, “Be careful airplane. Don’t crash! Don’t crash!”

If the flight was uneventful, we were not quite so lucky as we maneuvered our way through Narita Airport. Thankfully, Japanese immigration has a dedicated line especially for families with small children…and handicapped people. I don’t know if the grouping is all that flattering, but it’s hard to complain when we went from the back of a line with a 30 minute wait, to being in a line with one other family in front of us. Still, it was enough time for Noah to break free, run loose and screaming across the entire room, and then trip me when I finally chased him down. We also suffered a small casualty at the baggage pick up area. While Mark and I were busy pulling our suitcases off of the luggage conveyor belt, Noah took advantage of our inattention to place Baby Bear on the conveyor belt.

Baby Bear was a small teddy bear that Mark’s parents gave to Noah a couple years ago. He was the only one of Noah’s many stuffed toys that he had shown any kind of tenderness and attachment to. He made it all the way back from the Prado Museum in Madrid to Texas, then to California, then to Hong Kong, only to make Japan his final resting place (with us, at least). Rest in peace Baby Bear. You will be missed.