Monday
On Monday I joined with a group of five other mums who have children in grade nine at CAJ. We ate lunch at one of their houses. This was not an ordinary lunch, and that's due to the ladies who were present.
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| Yummy Asian lunch! |
I was the only 100% Caucasian lady there. The other ladies were various combinations of Korean, US, Japanese, and Chinese. And by various combinations, I mean that my background was one of the least complicated (I've only lived in two countries and I'm the same nationality as my husband and both my parents and the country I grew up in). Two or three of them are raising multiple nationality kids too (husbands with a different nationality than the wife). Conversation ranged between English, Japanese, Chinese, and Korean, so I'm not sure that anyone got 100% of what was said, least of all me, probably the least multilingual person there.
The food reflected the ladies present: a lot of Korean, plus some Japanese and possibly more (what's honey mustard chicken?). It was super tasty.
I'm accustomed to conversation about different Englishes, but these multilingual ladies were doing the same with Korean/Japanese/Chinese. If I knew more of these languages it would have been even more fascinating and there are many links between these three languages.
Tuesday
On Tuesday I went across the city to our national headquarters for a couple of meetings, mostly related to me handing bits of my jobs over to others while we're away. In between meetings I got to work in a room called "The Island"! My meetings included my Scottish boss (who is pretty fluent in Japanese), another Aussie, a man from Britain who grew up in Japan, an American who is ethnically Japanese and grew up in Japan with an American family, and a lady from Hong Kong. International is our normal!
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| Our Japan OMF headquarters is aquatic-themed. This room is called "The Island", upstairs are two meeting rooms called "The Stream" and "The River". Down the hall the finance team works in "The Oasis"! |
Lunch was with the various people working at the office that day. Our little table had three British people, all who've been in Japan for longer than me, and a bilingual Japanese lady. Topics ranged considerably, from blue cheese, to the Royal Wedding, and ingrown toenails (really!). My semi-regular Facebook status of Wednesday Words came up too, and they had some suggestions! Braces vs retainers, braces vs suspenders, tute for tutorial, trousers vs pants. Such fun, talking about language.
Today
Meanwhile today, I'm back at my little desk in my dining room, trying to discipline myself to attend to little bits and pieces of followup from yesterday as well as other ongoing things that need doing. (But instead of powering through I'm writing a blog post...)
It's weird to be divvying up my job to give to others and hard to stay motivated for the "now" or to get motivated for the "coming". I swerve between feeling scared about ditching work and feeling relieved! Maybe you don't understand the former feeling, but I have an underlying fear of boredom that sometimes (or maybe more than sometimes) drives me.
Ah, transition. Never easy, no matter how it looks. I know I'll eventually get around to embracing the freedom of handing over these jobs, but at the moment I feel a little like I'm balancing on a slab of ice in the middle of a lake.
I had wondered where The Island was when you posted it on FB. Looks like a great space!
ReplyDeleteThe whole building has been refurbished since you were there. It looks great!
ReplyDeleteI came across your blog looking for old-school Japan blogs...you know, those of the kind that were around in the 2000s before Japan became hip and Japan blog-land as invaded by so many new arrivals.
ReplyDeleteI'm Muslim and looked up your church because, to be honest, many Christian blog I come across are kind in their tone etc but belong to churches who dehumanise my family and people because of our Islam. I didn't find that with OMF, so I was glad to keep reading. I find Christians who aren't hateful to Muslims to be our, and my, natural friends - especially in this roughshod age of atheism, we have comforting common spots in faith. Profssor Tim Winter of Cambridge is a person who exemplifies this for me.
I have to ask, as there isn't much commenting on it, what motivates you to keep your blog going? Do you have community readership who are silent readers, or do you just do it as a record for yourself? Kind of like Hather 'Living La Vida Loca in Japan'? LOve reading her mundane daily posts and above all her archive going back to 1999!
In any case, thanks for the reads and I'll look forward to going through more of your blog, especially as there are so many themes of growign up with religion, faith and a desire to serve God that you don't find in Japan blogs, where writers are usually quiet about their faith or don't have any.
Take care!