Next Stop: Tokyo!

March 27: I'm excited to be leaving for my trip to Japan and Hong Kong. It's my first trip in 6 years that will last more than 4 days. My son Alex takes me and my huge blue suitcase, and small leopard carry- on case, to the airport.

March 28: 13 hours later, I arrive at Narita Airport in Tokyo. I never thought of myself as The Ugly American, but foolishly I expected that everyone would speak English when I arrived. Wrong! I stand in the midst of hundreds (thousands?) of people, all of whom are speaking Japanese and have no idea what I'm trying to say. Most just ignore my feeble efforts to communicate. Luckily, through the crowd I spot my friend Kentaro Chiba, the handsome young man who as an exchange student lived with my family in the states for his junior year in high school. Kentaro doesn't look like he's changed a bit from the last time I saw him. He is the reason I came to Japan, when he wrote and advised me that it had been ten years since he came to America and it was "high time" I came to Japan.

With him is his beautiful sister Mari, whom I've never met but is friendly and kind from the first moment. (Note: I am equally as good at taking pics as I am at speaking Japanese, which is why I have no pictures of Kentaro or Mari until two days later, when we are having dinner with the family and someone else brings out a camera.) Luckily Kentaro is fluent in English and navigates me through my ignorance of the language and smoothly out of the airport. Mari trained at the university to be an English teacher herself, so I couldn't be in better hands. I'm a bit dazed from the long trip and happy to follow them meekly to the car.

It's no surprise that Kentaro and Mari are so great. Their parents, Yoshimasa and Fumi Chiba, are two of the finest people I've ever met. After Kentaro finished his year abroad and returned home, they wrote and told me to come to Japan . They said all I had to do was get there, and they would take care of the rest. They meant it, too! Ten years later, I show up in Tokyo and they have my whole trip planned. Every hotel is hand-picked by them, and every day planned. Thank God, as I would have been lost trying to figure out where to stay and how to enjoy this beautiful country to the fullest without their assistance.