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Alone

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     Living in Nagoya is strange. I knew it would be difficult, but the things that I thought would be difficult sorted themselves out in the first week, and the things I didn't think about became increasingly hard to deal with.         I thought the trains and crowed streets would be overwhelming, and sometimes they can be. Nagoya station is the 8th busiest train station in the world. I see more people on my commute in one morning that I do in two weeks at home in rural Michigan. But for the most part people are polite and reserved. I may be surrounded, but no one talks to me or pays me the slightest bit of interest. It's an introvert's dream.         However, one thing I wasn't prepared for was discovering that I lack any true coping mechanisms to face life in Nagoya. At home, if I start feeling overwhelmed I can go for a run at the park, where I'll be by myself. I can climb a tree and trade insults with the songbirds. I...
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Family

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     I miss my family. I expected to miss my biological family, we're related by blood after all, and we live together. But what I did not expect was the wave of homesickness that washed over me when I entered Osu church for Sunday morning service.       Osu church is tiny, with barely any elbow room. Every time I stood up to sing, I put one foot into the aisle and stepped a little to the side so I didn't squash my fellow intern who had accompanied me to church.      But even though the experience of attending a tiny church in a country all the way across the world was new, the experience of worshiping with fellow believers was not. The Sermon was in Japanese, of which I could only understand a handful of words, but we took communion together on Pentecost Sunday. The words in the hymns were unfamiliar, but many of the tunes were the same. The experience with my new, Japanese church family was very different, and yet so much the same that...
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