whitneyinjapan

I really didn’t want this to be my first real post but…  

I’m OK… but, yes, I was in a car accident on Tuesday. Here’s the play-by-play:    

I was driving back to the Yakuba (town hall) with Emi after my morning classes and we were hit by another car that apparently lost control due to some black ice (or it could have been what they call shabeto (sherbet) here, which is what we would call “slush”). Thankfully, I wasn’t going very fast because it was raining and I was going up a little hill. Emi saw her swerving towards us first, pointed and said, “Look out.” I turned to look and saw her coming towards us at an angle. Then I heard a loud bang (I have no recollection of the feeling of being hit…just this loud noise). I never felt like I lost control of the car but I pulled over and stopped. I remember looking down at all of this glass in my lap and then looking over at Emi to see is she was OK (she was fine, though a little worried about me because I had some blood on my face). After we each took some window out of our mouths, I assured her I was alright and then noticed my side mirror was laying next to my lap. It had gone through my window and hit me, not even an inch from my right eye.  

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Welcome!  

I’ve been shamed by my cousin, Walter, into finally getting around to making my own blog.  I remember a certain phone conversation with Lindy in which I told her before I even left the US that I was going to start a blog so I would be able to share my experiences in Japan with my friends and family back home– let’s not count how many months ago that was, k?    

 Now that my computer is finally functioning again (thank you sooooo much Lee), I figured I could christen this happy occasion by putting it to good use and finally starting this thing.  I hope to include lots of photos (“a picture tells a thousand words” and all that), snippets from my daily life, my observations about life here and how it differs from the US (or at least my part of it), my Japanese adventures and anything else that comes to mind.  I’ve been sending weekly updates to Tom and Karla’s 5th grade class since the school year began so I will probably be including some of those for your enjoyment, as well.  I may even throw in some of my old emails (strange punctuation cleared up) that might not have made the rounds.  

If you have any questions or things you are interested in about Japan please send them my way— I’ll share what I know and, more likely than not, supplement that with lots of questions to Emi.I’m off to make my new baby look pretty (yeah, I have my priorities straight) but I promise I’ll post something more interesting tomorrow. Enjoy!