Last Goodbyes

Saying goodbye to Japan and all of my friends and family there was every bit as hard as I thought it would be, if not more so. Thursday morning, after I had put the finishing touches on my packing, my host mother and I walked around to her friends' houses in the neighborhood so that I could say good-bye and thank them again for the various gifts that they have given me.

At 9:30 we left for the train station, just the two of us. My host dad had to work and Midori had school in the morning. Our conversation was on good books that we had read, and it felt as if this was just the beginning of another adventure, not the end of a chapter of my life.

At the train station we went to a kiosk that sold beautiful obento lunches and my host mom bought one for me for the train ride home. We found my platform, along with the other YFU students staying in Sendai. Midori managed to make it to the train station right before I left so that we could say our last goodbyes.


We managed to take a few last pictures before tears started falling. We shared our favorite memories, the baseball game Mimi and I went to, afternoon tea with my host mother every day, the trips to Matsushima.... At the end my host mother said a little speech in her broken English about how she knows I will be able to accomplish great things, how she hopes that I will be able to go to Oxford someday, and how she knows I will one day be able to help with world peace. Her words made be break down in a fresh stream of tears and for a moment all I could do was bury my face in a tissue. I told Mimi and my host mom that when they come to America they must come and stay with my family, and then the train called for final boarding.

The train ride to Tokyo was two hours, and then there was another one-hour train ride to Narita Airport. At the airport I met up with many of the other YFU students. It was an extremely bittersweet reunion, with exciting tales of our adventures in Japan, and our sadness at having to leave after what seemed like such a short time. Everyone was talking about the huge earthquake the previous night. It sounded as though nearly everyone had felt the shaking in some form or another. No one seemed to be any closer to the source of it then Sendai though.

After a 10-hour flight to San Francisco, a three-hour layover, and another three-hour flight to Denver (we circled above the airport for an hour as we waited to land) I was finally home.