On my lunch break at the Institute of Higher Learning where I work, I heard this terrifying snippet of conversaton:

"Oh my god!  I didn't know 'Taiwanese' was like, a real thing."
"Yeah, they have, like, their own language and stuff."

Sigh.

Meanwhile, I am volunteering now with a program that matches up students/alumni with a foreign counterpart, and I met my new adopted pre-arranged friend tonight.  She's Japanese, per my request, and we spent hours tonight ruminating on the merits of okonimayaki and sharing nostalgia for good udon, and discussing the best way to describe nabe to an American:  something between stew and fondue, was the best we could come up with.  I had forgotten how most of my conversations with Japanese people have always eventually come back around to food, and I'm wondering just how hard it would be to scrape together a decent nabe from the ingredients available at my neighborhood HEB. 

It was also the first time I've had a conversation with a Japanese person who could truly empathize with and laugh at certain aspects of my daily trials in Japan, having seen Japan from a distance and having been through similar trials in a foreign place herself. We laughed and connected over my stories about the first time I went grocery shopping in my semi-rural market, the five mistaken purchases I made before I discovered what a bottle of hand cream looks like, being the only white person in a Japanese school, buying a daikon and having no idea what to do with it, asking my 34-year old Japanese friend to have "kyuu shoku" with me, a word for a lunch no one seems to use past the age of about 7, and so on.  I keep realizing that my experience in Japan was so great and so deeply affecting that it may take the rest of my life to really sort out what happened to me there.  That's something I had deeply hoped would happen, long before I even got my first Japanese passport stamp, and I'm grateful and elated that it seems to really be true.