Lessons learned on Guam

I spent most of the first week of August on Guam with three other English teachers for our use-them-or-lose-them five days of tokkyu (summer vacation). We flew out of Japan on Sunday's red-eye and flew into Japan on Friday's first flight out and packed all of our waking hours in between with sight-seeing, shopping, and stuffing our faces with American food. Although the trip wasn't a cheap one, I am proud to say that I was able to eat for four days at just around $100, thanks to splitting every meal but breakfast with my friend, H.V. (I highly recommend the California Club pizza at California Pizza Kitchen. But I strongly advise you to stay away from the CPK Cobb Salad. It's way too rich.)

Guam is an American territory that sits closer to Japan (three-hour flight) than it does to the United States (eight-hour flight to Hawaii). As a result, 75% of its tourism is comprised of East Asians (historically Japanese but increasingly South Koreans and Chinese); and the Japanese written language can be seen alongside its English equivalent on restaurant menus and mall directories and the spoken language heard just as frequently if not more predominately than English. Its interesting history has resulted in a blend of Chamorro (native), Spanish, Asian, and American family and location names. But rather than write a post that is a history lesson, I'll let you read more about that here and here. Guam has beautiful scenery; and I took too many pictures to post on this blog. So please click here if you'd like to see some of the views I saw while there. Instead, I'll use this post to enumerate lessons I learned/opinions I developed while on Guam:

1. Diet Coke really doesn't taste good and should never become an acquired taste.
2. The world's largest Kmart, while very nice, can't be all that boastful if it carries only two George Clooney movies (one of which is Return of the Killer Tomatoes!) and no York Peppermint Patties.
3. Stomachs shrink after living in Japan; and American restaurant portion sizes are sickeningly huge.
4. Omiyage, the Japanese art of gift giving to honor relationships, is a racket designed by Japanese companies to keep themselves in business.
5. Liev Schreiber almost wins the award for the perfect villain's voice. Sadly for him but happily for us, he's beaten out by Alan Rickman.
6. Touring World War II battle and memorial sites with Japanese people is somewhat awkward, even though the war is most probably the fault of neither of us.
7. Americans are very loud and need to be more discreet about or, even better, not discuss at all their spouse's reproductive problems and their "bastard child(ren) in the Philippines" over Chili's chips and salsa.

Until next time...