Vacation with my Parents

I'd like to backtrack a little, because there was an important happening about which I have not written too much (if anything) about on my blog yet. At the tail end of January and for the first few weeks in February, my parents were here in Japan for the first time! As a result, I was able to do a lot of sight-seeing with them!

I went to Shikoku for the first time in my life with my parents on January 30th. Shikoku is a small island to the southeast of Honshu, the biggest island of Japan. It is close enough to Honshu, however, that there are several bridges connecting the two islands, and we rode across a bridge in a bus and were able to see the famous Naruto Whirlpools in the inland sea area below the bridge.

After arriving in Shikoku, we went to a beautiful sculpture garden full of stone works by a Japanese sculptor named Noguchi (surname) Isamu, who spent time in both Shikoku and in New York. The garden was fairly separated from the town in which we were staying, so we only had time for the one sightseeing location that day.

It was really interesting to translate for my parents while they were here with me. I have always felt comfortable speaking Japanese as opposed to reading it, so just translating menu items and information about tourist sight locations was not a huge ordeal. However, it's more confusing than I would have guessed. My mind was running a million miles an hour, easily processing everything that I heard in Japanese. But when it came time to say what I heard in English, that was more difficult. I found myself searching for the right words and sometimes saying things backwards or in an odd grammatical order due to the grammar discrepancies between English and Japanese and my desire to quickly repeat what I had heard word for word. It was a fun challenge, though, and I felt like a guide, explaining what I had been studying for the past few years to my parents, who were experiencing it for the first time.