Quist World Tour

This morning, just before 5 am, a 5.0 earthquake somewhere northeast of us made a Tokyo’s ground tremble. I happened to wake up to the bed shaking a bit; this is the fourth time I’ve felt one in my life. Three of those four times I’ve wondered what Brian could possibly be doing in his sleep—a constant leg twitch? a terrifying nightmare?— to cause our bed to shimmy this way. One of those times was three days ago in the middle of the night in the same hotel room, but it didn’t occur to me then what it was. This morning I heard the wall shift slightly as it was happening and it became clear. Japan has small earthquakes almost every day, so this should be no surprise, but of course my nighttime self is not the most reasonable version of me, so I lay in bed another half hour wondering what might come next. I am the family seismograph—everyone else slept through both tremors this week.  This echoes my function in our family in real life. When one of our children is going thr...

We (except Natalie who hasn’t been with us much) don’t know any Japanese. Well, we know how to say five things to be exact. Hello. Goodbye. Thank you very much. Yes. Excuse me.  We read with the help of the Google translate app—you hold up your phone over the menu or sign or toilet directions, and English appears on your phone. It is always at least slightly off—what are meat trousers? Are they really serving fried chicken cartilage? So much of the Japanese foodie scene is wasted on me anyway, born with a strong gag reflex to anything that has lived in the sea (ask my mom). I so want to be a person who can eat anything, but I am not. And the food here is often not made for someone like me. This is a shame because there is excellent food at every turn. Even the 7-11 sells great food. Also not made for me (or the rest of my fam): observation deck windows and binoculars. We have to bend over pretty far sometimes to try to see something. Chairs and benches leave our knees at c...