Coming home on the plane from Guam to Osaka, they were showing the movie “No Reservations”, but we couldn’t find the channel that had the audio in English. Turns out that the movie didn’t have the English audio, and they made an announcement that they were very sorry that the movie didn’t have English audio. Then they made the same announcement in Japanese. Um, the Japanese had audio for the movie, why did you have to make an announcement for them???
Sitting in the Osaka airport right now and actually found a wireless network. This airport isn’t like the Tokyo airport – at least they had McDonalds, and other more American offerings. I may have to settle for the Doritos in Rick’s backpack.
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I have to say that this trip exceeded my expectations in many ways, and I was disappointed in other ways. I was so so so nervous about the long flight and 15 hour time difference with a 14-month old baby ~ my sister very graciously had offered to watch Mallory for us but I didn’t want to be that indebted to her ;-)
Turns out I didn’t have anything to worry about – Mallory was a great traveler and adjusted the the time change almost flawlessly (after our all-family power nap the first day!). She was adorable and smart and precious almost our whole vacation and I would have missed her terribly if we’d left her at home. That’s not to say that it would have been a totally different (i.e. more relaxing) vacation without the baby but I’m glad we brought her along.
My disappointment was solely because the island had changed so much since my parents were here 37 years ago. I don’t know why I expected Guam to be immune from the travel industry – the weather is fabulous – but I didn’t expect it to be so commercialized and touristy. I was happy that they carried normal food and had normal restaurants, but I could have done without the flashy lights and stripmalls with “massage” parlors.
We were able to get in to the Naval Hospital grounds with a printout of my dad’s discharge papers that my sister so graciously scanned and emailed to us. We found the Mother-Baby unit and found an Army guy who was on leave for 15 days from Afghanistan because his wife had just had a baby, he had made it back just in time for the birth. I got tears in my eyes talking to him and hearing that he had to go back and serve another year. It made me so grateful that people like him are willing to serve our country.
I’m going to power down…see you stateside…