America The Beautiful

This week I had to return to the States for work.  The only available flights out of Shanghai were all through Tokyo since people had booked up all of the direct flights trying to avoid it.  Tokyo is normally a pretty dead airport I’ve found and this time was no exception.  I picked up a few items, but decided to avoid the snacks in the pictures below (small crabs and octopus).  I’m not sure yet how that’s actually a snack; maybe after a few years here I’ll get it.  Also, I picked up some origami books for the kids and snapped a few shots of the origami scenes set up in the gift shop which were pretty impressive.

My initial impression of the States upon reentry is that I’m no longer the hulking giant at 5’9” that I am in China.  It’s quite disappointing after getting used to people barely coming up to your eyes to all of a sudden have the roles reversed.  Also, I’m pale.  In China, I’ve been complemented on it, which is kind of funny.  Since my first stop was Virginia Beach to see my parents and conduct some personal business, the paleness of my fair complexion stood out against the fake-baked leather faces around me.  Finally, the last thing that was underlined for me was that public urinal privacy is a luxury not considered in Asia.  Often there isn’t as much metal separating the squat toilets as there is separating U.S. urinals; be thankful for what you have.

Since I was only going to be in the office for only 2 days, I figured I would try some different things in order to stave off my body’s attempts to adjust to the new time zone.  Thinking I would just get up whenever I awoke, I found that between flying out Sunday morning and leaving Thursday morning, I tallied about 16 hours of sleep for the week.  This was not necessarily good for decision making, but I did find I slept about 7 or 8 hours on the plane back, so maybe it paid off.  The short trips are brutal.

Finally, I leave you with “tax fun fact”; don’t expect a lot of these.  America is one of the few countries that make its citizens pay taxes even while living abroad.  The company does true it up in some way for me personally and there are some credits that apply.  Here’s the fun part:  I can only be in the States for 35 days (travel days count) in a rolling year or the credits are lost; which basically means double the taxes.  So, this little 3 day trip ended up costing 6 days against that allowance.  Isn’t tax accounting fun?