I’m not sure what happened, but here I am and here we are.
Where?
New Zealand, South island.
We are pretty close to as far south as you can go, sitting in our hired van and listening to the roar of the Tasman Sea. I cannot remember ever hearing the sea as a constant roar like it is here.
It’s hard to start again. I never expected that I would write something every day, but I had hoped to do a bit better than every six weeks.
Should I start again…
A lot has happened since the 21st of April and most of what happened is Japan.
Japan. What were we to expect? My head had been filled with all those ideas of a rigid culture full of formality, requiring a set of skills that i’d always been reluctant to embrace. Instead I found a culture that, as different as it is to the one I grew up in, was nonetheless warm and embracing. Even although the use of translate apps was not as ubiquitous as it was in China (lot’s more people do speak English), we still just had the wonder of communicating with people in a way that crossed this cultural divide.
So then, what happened?
It is like we have entered another world again. I would never insult Australians or New Zealanders by suggesting that their culture is the same as ours, they are both very different from ours. Each distinctively their own, just not as distinct from ours as we have become used to. We no longer stand and marvel at how people dress and live, laugh at our attempts to communicate.
What we do still have is the wonder of place and no matter how much the culture seems similar the places are of great wonder and on a scale that we are quite unfamiliar with back home.
Thank god we’ve managed to keep our sense of wonder.
