eating.

We shared a table with another couple. Their names were Hiroki (I think) and Yoko from Japan. Yoko spoke English pretty well (better than I speak Japanese) but pronunciation was, again, hard to understand and her vocabulary was limited. Yoko loved to talk too. So every evening was the most stressful experience of the day as you spent the entire meal trying to figure out what she was saying. She was a supremely nice person but it was very frustrating. In Bar Harbor, I finally found a English/Japanese dictionary to try to help the conversation along. One evening she asked about Obama's popularity and when I said that he was pretty unpopular she asked why. So I started a spiel into economics and ran into a problem when she didn't understand what the word "unemployment" meant. It went downhill from there. Finally she just started nodding and saying "yes".

The only words that I understand in Japanese are (in English spelling), konichiwa (hello), sayanara (goodbye), sumo, and seppuku (ritual suicide by disembowelment). The first two come up at the beginning and end of a conversation. You can work sumo in if you try hard enough. It's preferable not to try to work the last word in at all.

We gained the most weight in the Chicago O'Hare airport because we found a Chili's. We made up for the entire week in one sitting. It was nice to have normal food again.

nc