I think I’ve got itchy feet.
I want to feel warm sand shifting
under my toes. I want to smell some
exotic, spicy food wafting from a pushcart stall. I want to hear the bustle of foreign
accents haggling over prices in a night market.
I suppose it is the reality of having a
newborn baby to look after, who needs fed every three hours. At the moment, a major family adventure is to
put the wee one in a poncho and go for a walk around the block. There aren’t any shifting sands or food
stalls in the block of apartments around ours in Nerima. I can smell ramen, though. It was exotic to me once. And I can hear people talking in a language
that used to be totally alien (not that I’m claiming to be perfectly fluent now). It’ll have to do for the time being.
I remember when I arrived in Japan for the
first time being told by another Westerner to try to appreciate everything
while the excitement lasted. He predicted
that in the first few months I would walk around being engrossed in a
thousand small details. I would look at
some tiles on a roof and marvel at how unusual they were. I would see a ramen store and breathe deeply
the unique aroma. I would stare at the
sea of unfamiliar faces, and wonder what people were saying to each other. And then after living here for a year, I
would pass the tiled rooves without noticing, get annoyed by the smell of yet
another ramen restaurant, and wish the people chatting in Japanese next to me
would shut up and give me peace. He was
a smart guy, that Westerner.
Vocabulary:
to have itchy feet – an idiom, meaning to
feel the need to travel or move on
to shift – to move
to waft – of a smell, to pass gently
through the air
to bustle – to move in an energetic or busy
manner
to haggle – to negotiate vigorously over
the price
the wee one – the little one; the baby
[“wee” is commonly used in Scottish English]
engrossed – absorbed; fascinated
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