The decision and departure

During the fall of 2016 my wife and I started considering a move abroad to provide our children with new cultural experiences and just a badly needed change of scenery. We looked at Canada, New Zealand and Uruguay (for 3 seconds) among other countries and in January 2017 after much research, we decided to move to her home country, Japan. 

Japan had everything we were looking for: easy immigration for us, since my wife and daughter are Japanese citizens, great history and rich culture, very low crime, a great educational system and a top 10 best health care system in the world. One last deciding factor was, very surprisingly, affordability. For decades, Japan has maintained a reputation for being "the land of the $10 Coke", but that's turned out to not be accurate, at least in the Osaka area. Housing is much cheaper than our previous home in Portland Oregon, utilities are about half, many food items are of equal price, while others, like cheese, are outrageous and the fantastic public transportation system will allow us to live without a car and be able to easily access any place we want or need to go.

After a few months putting together my and our son's requirements for a Certificate of Eligibility and the subsequent Visa, we were accepted by the Japanese government without much trouble and the packing and home selling stages started.

We decided to place our condo on the market through our great friend Laura, on Wednesday July 5th. On Saturday the 8th, after an open house, Laura contacted us saying we had an offer! The buyer said the cupcakes did it. We accepted it on Sunday and the month long sale got rolling. At that time I also gave official notice at work that I would be leaving my job on August 11, even though my managers had been kept in the loop of our plans from the very beginning. 

The hardest part was saying goodbye to our friends. Many tears were shed and much conflict and guilt was felt. Neither one of us have family in Oregon, so our friends are everything. Many times I asked my wife or she asked me "are we making the right decision?" But we knew this was what needed to be done. The song in the link below carried me through many silent tears in the middle of the night. Iona - Edge of the World

Finally on Thursday, August 24, the day came for us to make the move. Goodbye Portland Oregon USA... 

Hello world...

Welcome to our world!

Hi! It's me, Ivan. Through the years people have told me over and over "you should write a book", "you should blog" and assorted things like that. 

So here it is! My first attempt at blogging. 

On this blog, I will be posting about our family adventures since our move to Japan in August 2017. The first few posts will be mirroring what I posted on my Facebook page but with more pictures and a few videos thrown in there (if I can figure out how to do that stuff). So I apologize for repeating myself. I should be expanding the blog more and updating regularly (hopefully) since I will have more time on my hands that I can imagine. 

Once we are settled and I have more experience blogging, I'm hoping to open a second blog chronicling my trips to the many castles and other culturally rich places scattered all over the Kansai area of Japan. My wish is to make that more of a historical site, with more serious details of the places I see. I'm hoping to be able to profit from that site, to help provide for my family. 

Anyway, I hope you enjoy these posts and that you can feel like you are hanging out with us as we do fun things, meet interesting people and have my belly patted.

Thanks for coming along in this adventure.

Ivan