Just older not wiser

Not many days left in Japan, I have to start reweing things that this trip taught me and thing it didn’t teach me. What kind of wisdom shall I bring from this country?

1) Cheap service sector. The fact is that people back home do everything themselves; they cut the grass in the garden, wash the car, make the food. They work after work, at home. People don’t really work after work here, they eat out and that’s pretty much all they have time for. Just the fact that I didn’t have to work after work was nice. I will miss taking a taxi after having a huge dinner downtown.

2) The adorable kindness. There are so many stories about the kindness. One of them is the following one; I was walking in my own thoughts one rainy Saturday afternoon to the university, wearing a waterproof jacket but no umbrella. All of a sudden, I got interrupted in my i-pod circulating world by a woman who stopped her car, got out of it and started talking Japanese fast and loud to me. She grabbed an umbrella, gave it to me, said something in Japanese and went in to the car and continued driving. I was still in my i-pod world but I got the fact that she felt sorry for me, without an umbrella that she just gave it. A total stranger. The umbrella I got is the best one I’ve ever owned.

3)The convince store: open 24h a day and this is the best thing;.

4) The garbage separation; when I finally got how it, it actually makes more sense than the one back home. I will bring a brochure in English and lend it over to the environmental party. Just to prove to them how useless they are.

5)Communication; to make a long story short, communication is important. To be diplomatic is more important than to say the truth (the previous post on the survey on simple communication is still applicable but be more diplomatic).

6) The retired people: They seem to live a good life in Japan, they are active and most of them have a tighter schedule than young people in Europe. The cheap service sector (se point nr 1) …blablabla, yes you know the story.

7) Fat vs skinny Japanese: once and for all, the fat Japanese you’ll see are like normal weighted Americans you see in the states. You'll find a fair amount of overweighted young people - but not among the older ones. The traditional Japanese food like rice, fish and green tea with rice cookies as dessert (consumer: old Japanese) doesn’t make people fat while bakeries and Mr Dounut (consumer: young Japanese) makes people fat.