Eric's Beijing Diary

We got together this evening to talk with Melissa, who is teaching English in Northern Japan. John is holding his daughter on his lap, except that she is one the other side of the world. It is certainly a changing world. When I was a kid, calling the United States was a very big event. I don't ever remember talking to someone from the US while I was in Japan. We used to go to the Post Office and buy blue air letter forms. That's basically how we communicated. The other way was by sending reel-to-reel tapes back and forth. But even that, although it was a lot cheaper than calling, was not a frequent event. We did it only two or three times, I think, in all the years I was growing up in Japan. Now, it is so simple. Sometimes I think it's too simple. Something of the simplicity of life is lost in all the cacophony of social networking and email.