I have returned from Japan with full suitcase. The suitcase was full because of the products pictured here: many packets of tea, multiple teapots, and a tea cup. I am a tea snob, expressing a strong desire for tea from the countryside near my grandma's home, and I've happily returned with much product to consume. It's also a medical necessity: I had a cup of hot green tea in front of me for nearly the entire ten days and I might go into frightful fits of withdrawal if I don't ween myself onto a more maintainable consumption cycle.

My Japanese has gotten a lot better over the past ten days. I'm now better conversationally than I was four years ago, though probably still not as good as I was about ten years ago. I'm still far from fluent. I was most comfortable conversationally when speaking to my eight-month-old cousin -- my shy three-year-old cousin ran verbal loops around me, leaving me too embarassed to continue speaking. I purchased a copy of The Wizard of Oz to translate but I've only managed six pages of partial translation in several hours of effort.

I credit much of my progress to Japanese: The Spoken Language by Jorden and Noda. I probably wouldn't have understood the textbook when I was studying in middle school, but despite it's strange romanization of Japanese characters I found that I understood the language constructs much better than before. However, my profession training has taken over the foreign language portion of my brain. I find that I'm comparing many of the language constructs to computer programming language constructs, with particles as defining transition states and verbs as stacks.

More later, but now back to clearing out my e-mail and blog reader.