{"id":21,"date":"2007-09-06T09:13:48","date_gmt":"2007-09-06T13:13:48","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/scripts.mit.edu\/~espeed\/blog\/2007\/09\/06\/back-in-the-united-states\/"},"modified":"2007-09-06T09:13:48","modified_gmt":"2007-09-06T13:13:48","slug":"back-in-the-united-states","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/2007\/09\/06\/back-in-the-united-states\/","title":{"rendered":"Back in the United States"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>I meant to write this closer to getting back, but of course I had to deal with all sorts of things upon my arrival.<\/p>\n<p>This will be the last substantive post relating to this Japan visit, although I will add a scattering of new posts to make you all aware of pictures I&#8217;ve uploaded to some place on the internet.<!--more--><\/p>\n<p>I can mostly characterize my trip home as long.\u00a0 My body really doesn&#8217;t like sitting like that for so long.\u00a0 And while I was able to sleep a decent amount, it wasn&#8217;t nearly enough to make the time fly by like I might have wanted.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0Upon arriving in Chicago, I had a fairly painless customs experience.\u00a0 Of course it&#8217;s always easier for nationals returning to their home country so I wasn&#8217;t too worried about that.\u00a0 I remember the line I had to stand in to go through immigrations in Japan and it was probably even worse for foreigners in Chicago; that line was long.\u00a0 Our customs seem really lax overall though.\u00a0 When I entered Japan each customs agent was stationed behind a table, which made it appear they could search your bag if they wanted to.<\/p>\n<p>In the United States, there were two guys standing at the beginning of the corridor that lead to domestic connections and they just took people&#8217;s declarations.\u00a0 I didn&#8217;t see them search one bag.\u00a0 Which was good, because I didn&#8217;t want them to confiscate my contraband.<\/p>\n<p>\u00a0After that it was a simple quick hop to Boston and I could begin my new life of doing nothing but studying.\u00a0 I think I&#8217;m just about over the jet lag, although my body hasn&#8217;t quite adjusted to dealing with shortening hours of sleep.<\/p>\n<p>Thinking back, the biggest thing I miss about Japan is its people.\u00a0 I was discussing this with a friend who came back from Japan recently as well and he thought the extremely politeness was a bit overdone especially in the more mundane areas of life, such as, fast food restaurants.<\/p>\n<p>While there&#8217;s certainly some truth to that, over all, when I was walking through the Chicago airport, I couldn&#8217;t help but think, &#8220;There are so many ass holes here.&#8221;\u00a0 Even in Japan, when I was around a lot of foreigners, I just couldn&#8217;t believe how they could act so boorish in a world where their hosts were so accommodating.<\/p>\n<p>My biggest insight from Japan would have to be that there are a lot of Asians there.\u00a0 More than I&#8217;ve ever seen gathered in one place before.\u00a0 I&#8217;m used to being outnumbered but I can imagine how startling it is for a person coming from their own uniform society.\u00a0 Probably an overall good, solid, character building experience.<\/p>\n<p>In closing, I just want to reiterate that this ends the Japan visit of 07 portion of my blog.\u00a0 A lot of you cats probably were mostly interested in that, and in that case you&#8217;d probably safe stopping by once a week or so in search of pictures.\u00a0 (If you wanted to you could even bookmark the Japanese category specifically so the page wasn&#8217;t cluttered with other stuff.)<\/p>\n<p>As hinted at though, I won&#8217;t stop writing in my blog.\u00a0 It&#8217;s a good way of expressing opinions and sharing experience with some small portion of the world.\u00a0 They probably won&#8217;t be interesting to everybody though.\u00a0 They&#8217;ll cover topics such as new technologies, programming languages, the classes I&#8217;m taking, random other stuff I do which is interesting, political commentary, commentary on random interesting tidbits I find around the internet, reviews of anime, and probably even descriptions of my work space and how I maintain productivity.<\/p>\n<p>That&#8217;s a pretty long list, but I&#8217;ll categorize them accordingly and thus you can probably focus on any that you might find interesting.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I meant to write this closer to getting back, but of course I had to deal with all sorts of things upon my arrival. This will be the last substantive post relating to this Japan visit, although I will add a scattering of new posts to make you all aware of pictures I&#8217;ve uploaded to [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[4],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=21"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/21\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=21"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=21"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/erekspeed.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=21"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}