Expat Life and Creature Comforts

As we settle back into our normal life here in Japan, I just want to say how grateful I am that expat life is so much easier now than it was in yesteryear. Even 10 years ago when I was an intern here, the company at which I worked had one shared computer for a team of 7 associates! Then later after I joined Capital, my corporate apartment didn't have broadband access and so if I wanted to check my email at night or on the weekends, I had to walk to an outdoor payphone, hook my laptop into the payphone and dial into my internet provider. The payphone, right next to a very busy intersection, solicited a lot of weird looks from people who were wondering what in the world I was doing.

Certainly that's benign compared to some of the veterans that we've come across in Tokyo. People who have been here 10-15-20 years tell stories of no English doctors, no access to foreign foods, no English TV, phone calls home costing arms and legs, writing letters home (who does that anymore?). You might as well be talking about the 1800's as far as I'm concerned.

Websites, digital cameras, Blackberrys and cell phones, Skype, iChat, video cameras, Costco and the like are all things no one really had 10 years ago yet they have really changed expat life. There is one underappreciated aspect of technology that Shelley and I are extremely grateful for, and that's websites like Hulu.com, that put full episodes of our favorite shows, and even some movies, online...for free. Talk about making us feel more connected to our home.

So, in that vein, I thought I'd marry the two concepts, favorite TV shows and use being in Japan and link a Saturday Night Live skit they did of the Office in Japanese. There's a 15 second commercial at the beginning, then the SNL clip starts.