Narita International Airport

Eventually my eight days were up, and it was time to teleport back to the mundane land of Wisconsin. Busy city streets, shops open all night, and fascinating characters would be replaced by cold suburbia, lots of sitting in front of monitors worrying about backups and batch processing, and Packers fans. I’d like to pretend that I can make myself enjoy life exactly the same amount regardless of where I am, but it just doesn’t work. Japan is the most fun I’ve ever had. Wisconsin is depressing. Bleh. This customs guy was very careful with my box; he put on white gloves and gently untied the twine from it. They made Tets take the paint thinner that was in the oil-paint set I was bringing for Hiroko. The guy then re-tied the whole complicated twine getup for me. When I arrived in Detroit, before my flight to O’Hare the customs lady there also wanted to open up the box. She looked at the way it was tied, muttered, “I’m not going to be able to tie this back up for you”, took a big knife and slashed through the twine, rooted through the stuff and gave the box a shoddy tape-job. “Welcome home”, I thought.