Directionally challenged in the East China Sea

They say you learn the most about your partner when you’re abroad. Strange foods, foreign landscape, don’t speak the language…. really brings out the best in yah.

Tate often takes the lead as navigator, partly because he claims to find it “fun” to look at maps (freak), partly because he knows if he lets me lead we will inevitably wander along every which way, stopping to gander at anything and everything and that’s basically the antithesis of a good time in his eyes.

It’s not that I don’t know how to get from point A to point B without interruptions, it’s just that I enjoy a detour or two along the way. The scenic route, if you will.

If you give a deer a cookie… [Nara Park, Japan]

If you give a deer a cookie, he’ll wanna nuzzle your nookie.

Somewhere around the time Tate sat me down and made me watch some YouTube video of bowing deer and insisting we go see them whilst in Japan that I realized he really, truly did have my best interests in mind.

Kon’nichiwa, Japan [Volume 1: Osaka]

Osaka. The Nation’s Kitchen. Bright lights, bustling with tourists, gimme ALL the sushi.

(True to my namesake, here I am at IND with my carry-on… thanks for the airport dropoff, Mom!) The last time I had spoken to Tate before taking off from SFO and properly stowing my electronic devices, he told me he would be waiting for me past baggage claim in Osaka and (I quote) there’s no way I would miss him.

I didn’t think much of it, assuming he just meant it was a small airport and he’d be the only American. Little did I know he meant that he had flown a giant cutout of my head over on this business trip with him and drug it around this whole time just to whip out during my grand arrival.  To this day, my biggest regret in life was not having my phone handy at that moment. Anyone who knows Tate knows he is NOT the kind to draw attention to himself, thus he refused to recreate that moment, and immediately folded jumbo-Chelsea-head up and discarded her into the nearest waste bin. What a way to kick off my Friday.