Welp, folks, that's it. We're getting all set to pack it in here in Japanorama, at least for the time being. The Gaijin Patrol are leaving the sunny beaches of Osaka and heading out on the road, in part to enjoy the sunny beaches of Kansas. Which means, of course, that it's time for (fanfare please):
A Multi-Part Series of Vague Generalizations and Reflections on the Topic of Japan!
But first, to answer your questions, which are most likely "Wait, what?" and possibly "Huh?" Yes, we are leaving Japan for good; I'll be working at the kindergarten right up until the day before we leave, which is on August 22nd. Through some wizardry of temporal manipulation and airfare calculation, we'll have to fly to Korea, stay the night, and then arrive in Chicago an hour before we left, but still technically the next day, August 23rd. From there, we fly to scenic Kansas City International (or MCI for short -- stay with me here).
So yeah, here's the important stuff for anyone hoping to get some hangouts/signed photos/high-fives, etc., and I curse the HTML gods who did not bless us with a double-bold option: we'll be in the States from August 23rd until December 14th, when we fly back to Asia for Phase II of the Gaijin Patrol. In those four months or so, we'll be dividing our time among Lawrence, KS, St. Louis, MO, California, CA, and quite possibly other locales TBD (including a potential return to Kirksville, a city we left on the eve of a tornado that, as far as we know, levelled the entire town). We will probably be without the sorcery known as "cellular telephones," but we are reachable here or on Facebook, and we will be available and eager for some hang-outs with any Americans game enough to listen to bemused, drunken ramblings about Japan in person.
The aforementioned Phase II will be explored in greater depth once I can summon the linguistic brawn to do so. In the meantime, though, suffice to say that time with no work means more motherf***in' blog posts, yeeeaaaaah. Our goal here is to wrap up Japan with some summary articles on a variety of topics -- more of the same of what we've written on, certainly, but even vaguer, like "food" or "people" or, I don't know, "things that are off the hook and/or bananas."
Look for a post by this time next week, come hell, high water, or Mothra itself (oh yeah, expect more poorly-informed Godzilla jokes, too). ばんざい！ Or as they say in America, Excelsior!
