Traveling back to Dalian from Japan

Waiting at the airport in Japan I had a lot of mixed emotions. Glad to be going home, but also sad to be leaving the friendly, polite, Japanese culture. I will miss the smiles and the respectful bows given to every customer at every store. I will miss clean, hygienic bathrooms with warm seats with 10 different buttons. I will miss the western food that comes with being in a big city.

When we got back to China we new we were here because we....

• were in line to go through customs and someone blatantly cut in front of us
• were stared at too many times to count
• Trejan was getting A TON of attention and was asked how old he was. Good news, he got to say "qi sui" instead of "liu sui". A question he will be asked a thousand times this year
• three ladies (working at the airport) were smiling and commenting in awe of Nicole's hair, they may have never seen hair like hers before. I know they wanted to touch it, but we were walking too fast.
• almost got ran over by a taxi, got honked at in the parking lot of the airport
• on the drive 2-3 min from the airport we saw an accident and realized that in 11 days in Japan we did not see one accident!
• debated on asking the driver to roll up the windows because it smelled....

There are things that I didn't know I would miss about Japan until I got back to China..but in all, we are all glad to be back home.