Wednesday, March 30, 2011

The Big Move

It has been a little over a week since David (whom I know sometimes call Debu thanks to a joke during training), and it has been so incredibly hectic that I have barely even had the time to sit down and tell my loved ones that we are alive, let alone write an entry trying to detail everything, but now that we have moved into our apartment, there's a bit of down time... so I shall try my best to sum up what has occurred the past week and the amazing things we have seen.

So it all began last Monday morning around 4:30am (EST) when we arrived at the airport to begin or trek across the world... the airport portions were quite uneventful, minus the TSA breaking a zipper on my bad and Debu being lucky enough to manage to sleep most of the time. The flight to Japan was long, and mostly boring, Debu spent a good portion of the flight doing a combination of sleeping and talking to the 4yr old Japanese girl sitting in front of him, while I attempted to sleep and watched many in-flight movies. Due to the nuclear issues occurring in Japan, we had to take a slightly different course, which ended up being pretty cool since we flew over Alaska and Russia   

Then finally, after what seemed like an eternity, we were actually in Japan! The only highlight there was that I left a bag behind in luggage claim by accident and when I went to retrieve it, there was literally 10 guards protecting it and they were all incredibly polite and quite concerned, this was mostly hilarious because Debu and I had been joking for weeks that if someone dropped anything in the street that a policemen would be standing guard until the owner eventually came to retrieve it. This had me laughing hysterically for quite awhile since it was just so funny to see an entire station of people working to guard one single bag.


Now, I shall leave you with a view of Fuji-san from our apartment

Sunday, March 20, 2011

The Iodine

I am sure that just about everyone in the entire world has heard about the disasters that have been befalling Japan in the recent days, so as such, I figured this would be a great story to share (plus it's fun to embarrass mother dearest).
So since the disasters happened, mother dearest has been getting all of her news from not so accurate American stations who have been really hyping up the severity of the situation, namely the radiation problems, and have caused her to freak the hell out and demand that I go to a doctor and get Iodine. Being the caring daughter that I am, when I went to the doctor to refill my prescriptions to take over with me, I also asked "do you have any medical iodine at all?" and the clerk ponders for a moment and states "we do sell one type here" and proceeds to go acquire it.

Now, this is what mother dearest was expecting me to go get :
Iodine tablets, which you take very shortly after being exposed to higher doses of radiation to help prevent thyroid cancer. People right by the Fukushima plant were given them, because clearly they would have radiation from being within a few miles.


Here is what I came home with:

That would be Iodine solution, which doctors use to disinfect areas before operations, and people use on cuts much like neosporin, it will in no way help prevent cancer and will in fact make you quite ill and yellow if you use it all over your body.

Now at first, I simply showed mother dearest the receipt from the doctor, which simply said "iodine" and a price, and she was so happy.
But then the next day, my brother asked her "did you ever see what Jen actually bought?"
She looked at him quite confused, and we couldn't help ourselves... we began to laugh, and I finally told her that you cannot even purchase Iodine tablets through a doctor in this state, but that I had in fact bought Iodine like she had been so insistent upon me doing.
Poor mother was not too happy, she started saying that I would now not be safe and that over there they will only give the pills if you are a natural born Japanese citizen. This was about when father dearest stepped in and said that he thought the money spent was well worth it for the joke and that mother needs to listen to NPR more (or at least to my brother, who works at power plants)


I love you mom, you are my best friend in the entire world, and I will miss you greatly. Especially being able to do things like this to you <3

Friday, March 11, 2011

Pretending to be thin

The last few months my boyfriend and many others have been asking how I will deal with the fact that in the eyes of Japanese people I will not be "a normal American," I will be "an obese foreigner," and these conversations stuck in my head and started to make me quite worried.
These new worries got me to enlist into a fitness bootcamp, start eating healthier and going for hikes again, because of these I have lost a few pounds and feel a little stronger, but it was just not enough for me, I had to try and find a shortcut too. What was that shortcut? Well, I tried on some of those "instant slimming" products, such as spanx (http://www.spanx.com) to try and shed a few extra inches the easy way, and discovered the exciting way that it turns out my body type is not quite made for these products and wearing them creates rather uncomfortable and hilarious events to occur.
So while out shopping, I went into the dressing room and put on a cami and a thigh product they had, and decided to go for a quick walk around the store to make sure that they would work, first look in the mirror and all I can think is "damn, these things make me look great!", but then, I start to actually move. A few steps into my journey and the top suddenly goes *pllloooop* and rolls very tightly up to my bra, leaving a huge weird roll and a magically appearing tummy in its wake. So, pull it down real quick, hope no one noticed, walk a few more steps... then *pllloooop* the bottom rolls down into my pants and now tummy is being forced into this weird roll look out over my pants! After another quick embarrassed tug to put them back in place, I feel it's time to start making my way back to the dressing room to escape these things... but before I can make it back *plllooooooop* they have BOTH rolled up and I am looking quite strange and blobby. Getting these products off of my body was also not an easy task, perhaps it was due to all the rollings, but they both had decided they wanted to never leave my body again and it took a good five minutes for those damn thigh things to release me from their jaws!

So anyways, looks like it is back to working out, eating healthy and hoping for my waist to slowly vanish. No more short cuts for me.

Monday, March 7, 2011

two weeks left

There is just slightly under two weeks left until my boyfriend and I leave for Japan, and today I went through the first very hard step towards doing so, I moved out of my place in Richmond VA and back in with my parents to spend the last few days with them. The going away party was wonderful, the two weeks leading up to it were touching and the packing process took much longer than expected, I did quite well about not getting emotional too, until I looked around and saw the empty bedroom... the tears were flowing openly and it was quite difficult to not just get back into bed.