Monday, January 09, 2012

Monday January 9, 10:49 p.m.

This is the 4,185th entry since I started this blog all the way back in 2003. And this will be my last entry as well since the title is no longer relevant to my current situation. I'm back for good in my hometown of Toronto, Canada. Yup, I'm now currently an unemployed teacher in The Great White North, trying to carve out some sort of new life in an old city in my middle age....almost sounds like a premise for a new sitcom. In any case, that's old Narita Airport out there.


And this was my final meal in The Land of the Rising Sun....a plate of Japanese-style hamburger topped with grated daikon and ponzu. Not exactly the most traditional way to finish off my nearly 2 decades of culinary life in Japan, but then again, I was eating karaage bento 3 times a week. I will definitely miss my fried chicken with rice...along with kaiten sushi, tonkatsu and tonkotsu ramen.
Japanese food may exist all over the world now but nothing beats the real thing.



I will also miss truly convenient convenience stores, the vending machines on every street corner, near-absolute safety and subways/trains that actually come on time. But most of all, I'll miss the students and friends whose lives I was allowed to enter since 1994. The profession of English conversation teacher has been an invaluable one for me. I don't think I could've been exposed to such a large swath of Japanese society in any other type of career. I can consider myself lucky that I will still be able to have contact with a lot of them via other media such as Mixi and Facebook.

Although I finish this blog, I've already launched the sequel "Tokyo To Toronto"on http://www.tokyototoronto.blogspot.com . If some of you Americans or Russians would like to know what happens in Toronto beyond episodes of "Flashpoint", come and visit me there. I just have this need to ramble on and on and on.

Sayonara!