On the Plane

We made it to Japan! We’ve landed in Osaka, a first for our family. With our luggage filled to the brim of structural integrity with books, we rolled our way through Union Station onto the UP Express to Pearson, a surprisingly speedy pass through security, as I think they were only so glad to hustle our brood through and out of the country, and then hung around for a while as our plane was delayed.

The flight is never as bad as I fear it to be, and this time we mostly slept and snacked and read our way through what is actually not a tremendously long amount of time. The kids were mostly troopers when they were not bickering and asking me for more snacks, so overall I guess I’m glad we brought them. I’m both looking forward to and dreading the day when flying is a solo act of being engrossed in a book with no one to bother me, so I’ll take what I can for now.

I let the kids each pick one snack for the plane ride, and Caleb picked this tin of roasted cashews. He has long expressed how much he likes cashews, but no one has ever taken it seriously, at least not to the extent of buying them for him. He gets to pick out the cashews from when we get take-out fried rice, so he’s not totally deprived; that must be like six cashews a month. In any case, he made good use of his one free choice snack.

We’ve had a few very, very full days here so far, exhausting and jet-lagged and thrilling: everything new and fast and convenient and the toilets fancy and the stationery plentiful and the food excellent. What a rush, to try and sort through things in a new place, in a foreign language, trying not to step on any cultural toes, enjoying the convenient store snacks.

Missing home, just the tiniest bit, but also glad to have brought a few pieces of home with us: the familiar patterns of reading aloud, favourite snacks to tide over us to culinary acclimatization, everyone’s trusty mechanical pencils for all the math homework they’re going to be doing.

Getting settled into the time zone and the adventure, and grateful for the grind and the magic of it.

Still, nothing as heartbreaking as a tuna burrito while you’re over the ocean.