My cousin married a woman from Japan that he met when they were both students at Northern Michigan University, in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. Earlier, he had studied in Germany, and speaks German fluently. They now have 3 boys who are totally conversant in English and Japanese, and are now getting more serious about learning German.

Such a person is practically guaranteed to have a job waiting somewhere. Learning the languages while young is the key. If they become part of you while young, you never lose them.

But it was one we don't mind re-telling once a year around this time!

We're looking at number 35 in a few more months.

Well done!

Happy anniversary, DFW.

But I hid a lot when the photographer was around, even if I wasn't able to avoid him completely........

ESPECIALLY when it works out!

Again, congratulations for making it work out all those years.

There always are. But we keep avoiding the worst of them until we no longer can. That's all anyone can do, right?

like this:

Lovely!

Our younger daughter decided she wanted to go far away to finish up high school. She ended up in Waimea on the Big Island, and still considers herself Kama'aina.

and thank you for sharing that wonderful story!

Maybe not exactly traditional, but with "tradition" in our family being a mish-mosh of atheist, Catholic and Shinto Buddhist, what's traditional anyhow?

Congratulations!

waves from CH.

Und Grüezi!

Unless you're in la Suisse romande or Ticino!

Basel area.

I actually took the day off (well, almost).

Don't tell anyone.........

I aged while my wife did not (Germans can be stubborn that way....)

such a cool part of your lives with us.

(shhhh---I'm just along for the ride! Don't tell anyone!)

RESIST!

Happy anniversary.

But like Bill Clinton said of the Republicans, their motto seems to be:

"If it ain't broke, BREAK IT!"

The reception looked like the United Nations! There was a Hungarian-speaking friend born in Transylvania (fortunately vegetarian), and my brother had a guest who spoke Taki-Taki, which is apparently some pidgin dialect used in Surinam, where she came from. That plus the usual diet of Japanese, German, Danish, Dutch, and a LOT of etc. including Noo Yawk, Baaston and Suthun.

A photo of the four of you taken much more recently!

Here's one from 1995 in Washington (a familiar face or two along for the family pic):
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And one from 2012 (I think it's the last time we were all in the same place at the same time--my younger nephew's college graduation, also in Washington)
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Me on the left, my wife on the right, my younger nephew in the middle with his parents on either side of him. I have others with three out of the four of us, but all four in one place? That's like asking Haley's comet to show up outside of schedule.

That is really my brother next to his newly graduated nephew, and not Joe Biden!!

We'll be trying!

Happy anniversary to all four of you, and may there be many more years of joy and love ahead.

But we're going to tempt fate anyway. I have a one in four chance of making it to 80. But hey, SOMEbody has to be that one in four, so why NOT me, right?

DFW, I think that you have earned a lot of good karma out in the world. If anyone is going to 80 and beyond, I have a feeling it will be you. Start looking at that 25% as 100%. Positive thinking goes a long way.

I have mentioned this before, but when my wife and I were first introduced, I took one look and said "WOW!" but I knew the score from high school and college--nerds like me never end up with women like her. But then it hit me (just in time)--if I went around with THAT attitude all my life, then I never WOULD end up with a woman like her. Bobby Kennedy was right: "why not?" And so here we are, all these decades later.

That positive thinking paid off. So do it again.

And in addition to your family and friends, DU'ers would like to have you around for a long time to come as well. So get to that 100% and stay with it. That's a DU order.

You leave me no wiggle room........

Now I know how a straightjacket feels!

It's a 'live way longer than 80 years' no option plan!

I signed on the dotted line.

That means you definitely have to hang around through 80. So you may as well go beyond that, by at least 10 or 20 more years.

And I'll chant there's no place like home (better than my daughter thinking Americans chant "I spread the peaches" in public schools, right?), and we'll see if it gets me to 80. Don't go placing any bets, though, just in case Mother Nature has other plans.

I have related this story on DU before but when my daughter was 16, she went for her high school semester abroad to the USA, specifically to the public high school local to the house in Dallas. I went with her and stayed for the first week in case she had any problems. After the first couple of days, I asked her if all was going well. She said yes, but there were a few things they definitely don't do in Germany. I said this was to be expected, but was there anything specific? She said, well, yeah, for example the ritual chanting they do every morning.

Ritual chanting? In a Dallas public school? She said yes, they really do that. At a given moment they all stood up and mumbled this odd chant in unison. She had seen Buddhists do it on TV, but never seen it live. I didn't get it. Ritual Buddhist chanting enery morning in a Dallas public school? But she doesn't lie, so I asked what they chanted. She said they mostly mumbled as if they were bored or in a trance, and it started out with, "I spread the peaches..." I couldn't believe it. They chanted something in unison that began with "I spread the peaches?" What else did they do? Well, she said, they all put their right hands on their chests while chanting. She was too scared to ask what they were doing, since everybody else seemed to think it was the normal thing to do.

Finally, I figured it out. I had totally forgotten about this little aspect of US public schools. After all, it had been a lot of years since I attended one. I asked if they might they be saying "I pledge allegiance?" She didn't know, since she had never heard the words "pledge" and "allegiance" before. No such ritual is done in German schools, so she had no earthly clue as to what they were doing or why. She wasn't completely up on all the ways of the world yet.

One time, we were in New York City, and she wanted to get a bottle of mineral water. I gave her a few bucks and said there stores all over that sold it. She was about 20, so she didn't need me to hold her hand. She came back shortly after, complaining that some guys at a construction site were making fun of her when she passed. I asked why, and she said she had no idea. I asked what they did, and she said that when she walked by, they all started waving in her direction, and yelling, "hello there, beautiful!" So she turned around to see who they were waving at, and there was nobody there. They kept calling, and she kept turning around, but there was still nobody there. It never once occurred to her that she was the one they were calling and waving to.

or did you have to Google it?

The stories about your daughter are wonderful. I bet you were practically scratching your head trying to figure out what this 'ritual chanting' was all about. When I read the story, I laughed so hard just picturing the conversation between the two of you.

I didn't get to start traveling to other countries until I was in my mid-30s. So maybe being a little older helped me. But I do remember a lot of times where I would be taken aback by something that was normal in another country, but would be considered really out of place in the United States. Or vice versa.

The silliest situation that we came across in traveling was that dogs are allowed in restaurants. ('We' being myself and the ex-fiance.) You just don't see that in the United States, unless it's a guide dog.

I remember that we were in Belgium, in a wonderful old city, the name of which I can pronounce but cannot remember how to spell.

We found this lovely restaurant, and went in to have a meal. And as we were sitting there reading our menus, we noticed that there were a number of dogs sleeping peacefully under the dining tables.

It finally hit us that these were the pets of the people who were dining in this restaurant. And then we got the giggles, the likes of which you cannot imagine. We started talking about our dogs at home, and the fact that they never would have behaved so well. They would have been going from table to table, begging for every scrap of food they could get. I don't know how they train dogs in Europe, but I have to give everyone an A+.

In that same restaurant, we had a bit of a language barrier. The waitress didn't speak very much English, and I have never been very good at picking up foreign languages. I have tried numerous times over the years, but my brain just doesn't want to go there. I always try my best when I am in a foreign country, but once in a while a strange word will come up that will stump me.

I was trying to read the menu, and there was one food item I could not figure out. It was something that came in a salad. So this lovely waitress started drawing a picture on a napkin, to try to let me know what type of animal protein was in this salad. We did have a translation book with us, and she actually tried to use that first, but could not find the word she was looking for, so we had to go to drawing pictures.

She finally got done with her drawing and handed it to me so that I could figure out what this animal protein was, and I was horrified when I looked at the drawing.
I'm pretty sure I gulped, the blood probably drained out of my face a bit, and I looked up at her and I said 'CAT?'
I know that people in other countries eat different foods than we do, but CAT?

Somehow, this sweet woman knew what the word cat meant, and she started shaking her head no, and then grabbed my translation book and started going through it again, until she could find the word 'pig.' It turns out the salad had bacon in it.

It must have taken the three of us 10 minutes to figure out that the word I was looking for was pork / bacon.

It's going on 30 years since that happened, but I can remember it like it was yesterday. It brings back such wonderful memories. Somewhere in a photo album, (that the ex has possession of,) there is a drawing on a napkin of a pig that looks like a cat.

I have not traveled in many, many years. And I sure do miss it.

But I had been asked about it within the last year, so my memory is not as encyclopedic as you might think.

I'll bet you were in everyone's favorite tourist town in Belgium, which is Brugge (in Flemish) or Bruges (in French).

While "pork" is "porc" in French, it is "varkensvlees" in Flemish, which is the main language in Brugge. The animal "pig" is "cochon" in French and "varken" in Flemish, so not easily recognizable to an Anglophone.

When I'm on the job, I'm usually in a different country every day. The Jason Bourne routine definitely beats a desk job, but the mileage does pile up, and at 67, the lost sleep does weigh on me more than it did 40 years ago. Even so, though, I'd rather die from exhaustion than of boredom.

Our daughter has lost her shyness in the meantime, but at the time she was just too intimidated to ask her classmates, "would someone please tell me what THAT was all about?" She was scared to come across as an idiot for not knowing. Her first inkling that cultural differences are nothing to be ashamed of came a year after the peaches.

We were at our first Renaissance Weekend in South Carolina, and she was on a panel where the teenagers were to explain who their heroes were. She was near tears, because she had grown up in Germany, where, even 50 years after the Third Reich had fallen, the concept of "heroes," glorified by the Nazis, was now frowned upon. She therefore had none. I told her not to worry, and just to tell the Americans (she still considered herself very much German back then) exactly that. Used to the rigid German educational system, she protested that the instructions didn't allow for that. I promised her that the Americans would not see things so narrowly defined, and to go ahead and say what her viewpoint was. She was skeptical, but came back afterwards, beaming. She said that her answer was the best-received of the panel, and that the American kids had been very intrigued by her answer. That was her first inkling that what she had to say about something was as valid as what anyone else had to say, and she gained a lot of self-confidence starting right there and then.

You need to know how to pronounce the French "u" (same as in Dutch or Swedish), which is the German "ü."
Then you just say Dür-BWEE, don't stretch out the "BWEE," and you're pretty much there.

And I've never heard of the place. It doesn't appear to be on any train line, and looks to be some 30 km south of Liège, which by Belgian standards counts as the middle of nowhere.

I think the margarine commercial came up during a climate change discussion. You know, like Republicans want us to think there is nothing of the sort going on, while Mother Nature's undeniable evidence is swatting us in the face.

I was still working on it. LOL. So I'm deleting the original, and leaving the corrected reply! I think I'm tired.

My heart just broke at the news. My brain could not accept what I was seeing in all the videos. For someone who really hated history classes in school, I sure learned to appreciate it a few years later. And to see history going up in flames, the only word is heartbreaking.

I am so grateful to say I have been there a few times, and I so hope they can rebuild. I have a feeling it will take more than five years, but however long it takes, it will be worth it.

After writing that, it seems silly to ask about Chiffon margarine. But I have to ask, how in the world did that come up in conversation over a year ago? Trivial Pursuit?

I have been to Bruges, but it wasn't the city I was thinking of. I finally found it. It is called Durbuy. I'll take a wild guess that you know how to pronounce it, and it does not sound the way it is spelled. That's why it took me so long to find it. It has been a few years since I've been there.

I was there in the early 90s, on the advice of some friends who were from Belgium, but at the time were living in the United States. It was such a beautiful town, one I wish we had spent more time exploring. I remember taking a photo of a beautiful street, and I never went down that street to see what was there. To this day it drives me crazy that all I did was take a photo, and walk off in another direction. Maybe someday I will get to go back there. Fingers crossed!

While I absolutely envy your being able to travel from country to country, I am sure it does get exhausting. I am only four years behind you in age, and I know it was a lot easier to travel when I was in my forties than it is in my sixties. And excitement beats boredom every day of the week, so if that's the way you go, (being exhausted,) I would think it was worth it.

How wonderful for your daughter to have all of these incredible experiences as she was growing up. I always dreamed of traveling all over the world, but I didn't leave this country until I was in my thirties. And unfortunately, the budget doesn't allow for much traveling now. But at one point in time, I was lucky enough to get to see a bit of the world.

I was drawn to Italy like water to a sponge, and it is my favorite of all the countries I have been to. I swore I would go back and live there for a few years, just so I could soak up the history. But that hasn't happened, and I think it probably won't at this point, but you never know.

And I was there when they were having a postal strike, a gas strike, a transportation strike and another strike that I can't remember. All of those strikes caused a LOT of frustration during our travels, (ever try to get to Venice when there is NO transportation?,) and yet that is still my favorite place!

Wonderful story. Very cool that the kids have dual citizenship. They may need it to leave this country if the Orange Buffoon is successful with his power grab. Sigh..

Not because of Trump, but definitely because of Republicans. She graduated from law school near the end of the Bush recession. No jobs to be had in her field anywhere in the USA. Even Harvard and Yale grads were being told, "we'll take you, but go wait on tables until the economy picks up and we can employ you full time."

My younger daughter said, screw that, and flew off to Frankfurt after her final exam for a legal job fair. The Frankfurt arm of one of the top 5 British International law firms said they were looking for someone, but with very specific qualifications. My daughter asked, OK what qualifications? They said: fully bilingual in English and German, EU citizenship or work permit, and a US bar exam so their prospective newbie could do legal work in and for the USA. My daughter said, OK, I fulfill every one of your requirements. At age 25, she got an offer of an €85,000 starting salary, and she was off to the races. She would have loved to work in Boston, New York or Washington, DC, but not as a waitress, so back to Europe she went, and she has been here ever since.

🎈Happy 37th Anniversary🎈, DFW! Wishing you many more.

We do see her with a bit of frequency. She now has TWO high power jobs, one being the one she has when she is being a partner in her law firm, and the other is being mama to her 10 month old baby girl.

She had better watch it with this baby. The kid is as smart as her mama is, and THAT will mean trouble down the line!

What a beautiful family you have. You are so very blessed!

I may be dense, but I'm not THAT dense!

My wife is Japanese as well and she said at age 21, my son will be forced to choose which of the two he wants because they generally don’t do dual citizenship there.

How old is your son? They may changed the rules for dual nationals born after a certain year. Not that they have ever made use of their Japanese nationality. My brother's wife chose NOT to speak Japanese to them, and thus took away their chance to be fluent in a language that is very difficult for an Anglophone to learn. My wife and I ALWAYS spoke our own languages to our girls, and it has turned out to benefit both of them professionally. They are completely bilingual. One of them will be a millionaire by the time she is 40 because of it. She busted her ass to get the position, but it was one hardly anyone else could have filled anyway.

I will investigate.

Nonetheless, congratulations to the four of you!

Both my nephews wish they could have been bilingual like their "German" cousins (my daughters), but their mom wanted to make a clean break. Back in Japan in 1981, her job as a female bank teller in Japan promised her a long-term job prospect as....a bank teller. Within ten years of moving to Washington, she was vice-director of the World Bank for Asia. I can understand why she was upset with her homeland, but she still denied her sons an important cultural advantage both of them would have loved to have had.

We have been having my son go to Japan for 6 weeks in the summers to attend Japanese public school to improve his Japanese. He loves that and seeing his family.

My wife also doesn’t quite fit in at the workplace in Japan. She is too aggressive - even by NYC standards! She scares the daylights out of the men in Japan because she is so strong (but fair). The thing with seniority ranking higher than competence also doesn’t work for her.

She did not see herself as a bank teller for the rest of her life. Fortunately for her, neither did the World Bank in Washington.

Still alive and kicking (and crazy) after all these years..........

We just keep on keepin' on!

and congratulations to all involved!

Luckily, being "the foreigners," all we had to do is show up. My elder daughter is getting married this year. I will not get off so easy this time!

Thanks for sharing your story, and Happy Anniversary!

I think they were happiest when after ten years, we were all still together!

CONGRATULATIONS!!!!

...what a wonderful world it would be.

I think you will find plenty of people who disagree with you!

Especially when I get to play a major supporting role!

What a lovely story!

Especially if you see things from a Western-dominated, Christian-only, anti-choice point of view.

My sister-in-law is a Japanese Shinto Buddhist who saw dressing up in a western traditional wedding dress as an exotic, foreign, fun thing to do. It was her choice. She broke with her own tradition just as my wife, a German from a 500 year old Catholic family, also chose to wear something not at all traditional for her culture.

If it makes you feel any better, my sister-in-law shed the white gown and the veil for the reception and put on garb traditional to her home country--something that, on the other hand, came across to us as exotic:
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That is especially appreciated! Thanks!

Cancer is part of me but I am not going to be defined by it. Life is just too good to allow any part of it to be over ridden by cancer.

This village has really reached out me and I want to remain part of it.

You have an extraordinary gift, it should give all of us a lift with your sharing: it certainly gave me one!

There are some things that transcend temporary political differences, and that's a good thing!

I love romance.

Happy Anniversaries!

We were trying to decide where to celebrate yesterday. We considered a few Indian restaurants downtown, and chucked them all for our local Italian place in our little village. It has been there for as long as we have (1982, though I haven't lived there full time the whole time).

The personnel has changed, but the quality of the food, luckily, has not. Our waiter spoke some Italian, but clearly wasn't entirely comfortable with it. When he brought us our appetizers, on a hunch, I said "thank you" in Albanian, and he broke out in a big smile. We had GREAT service for the rest of the evening!

in your little village in Germany.. That sounds delicious.. great longevity genes like your marriages!

How do you say thank you in Albanian? Wait... here's google..

Faleminderit!

Sqip (pronounced like "ship&quot , meaning "Albanian" in Albanian.

When saying Falemenderit, stress on the fourth syllable: fah-leh-min-DEH-rit (don't know if Google told you that).

but that's the way I said it to myself.

Faleminderit!

From your long-forgotten Albanian ancestors, no doubt........

Schöne, tolle Geschichte! Und das sich die Eltern vertragen konnten bei der Axis-Hochzeit...!

[Beautyful, great story! And that the parents got along during the axis-wedding...! ]

My wife and I have always spoken German to each other, and that's just about 45 years now.

When "that" is the start of a relative clause, and not being used as a pronoun, it's either "dass" or "daß." Comma after the "und," too, but even lots of Germans miss that one. My wife is a social worker, and she used to tell me horror stories of Germans she worked with whose written German made mine seem like Heinrich Böll.

The parents were a little lost when left on their own. During the wedding and the reception, there were always people around who spoke German or Japanese. But one evening the four of us went out and left the parents on their own. When we got back, they were comparing songs they knew. My sister-in-law's mom knew a few German songs she had learned in Japan during the war, but had no idea whatsoever what the words meant. They had learned them by rote in school. My wife's parents only spoke Hochdeutsch and Pladdütsch (from the Cloppenburg/Oldenburg area), and my parents only knew English, French and Spanish. Their communication was less than sophisticated.

Funny story--when World War II ended, the US army was desperately looking for European families to put up our soldiers until transport home could be found for everyone. My dad's commanding officer came into the tent where his unit was staying, and asked, "does anybody here like to sail?" No one, including my dad, liked to sail, but my dad was smart enough to ask, "why?" The officer, said, "well, there's this rich family with a huge villa in Switzerland on the shore of Lake Geneva who...." "I LIKE TO SAIL!" said my dad before anyone else realized what was going on, and so he spent a few weeks in this fabulous Swiss villa before getting on a boat home. He kept in touch with the family, and when I was 18, I also spent a couple of nights in that villa. He stayed in touch with them by letter all those years, and when I made my first "Europe on $5 a day" trip in 1970, the kids he had hung out with now owned the place, and I hung out with THEIR kids.

You always have the best stories.

I'm so glad you and your family are doing well.

Steve

We're clanking along as best as the old bones can carry us!

Alas, I am a native German speaker, but doing everything correctly on an Abdroid device is a pain!...


Here goes my German again:

Ursprünglich bin ich Schwabe, aus Stuttgart.

Schaffe, schaffe,
Häusle baue
Hund verkaufe,
Selber belle...

[Originally I m from Swabia, from Stuttgart

Work, work,
Build house,
Sell de dog,
Bark yourself]

Don't you have to fill your mouth with Spätzle first?

Followed by Maultaschen...

It's OK, not much has changed since yesterday.

Just being curious...have you ever shaved your beard / mustache since you got married? I would love to see a pic of you without it.

Last edited Thu Apr 11, 2019, 06:19 PM - Edit history (1)

I share a sensitive skin problem with, of all people, Yassir Arafat. I have extremely sensitive facial skin, and if I shave, even with an electric razor, my skin turns bright red like a boiled lobster. Arafat used to solve his "problem" by clipping his beard short with scissors, which I thought looked terrible, so I let mine grow out instead. My high school tried to pressure me to shave it off for the graduation ceremony (thought they were being "conservative" ), and I told them no way. As revenge, I slipped my brother, a junior at a rival school, into the graduation picture, and they never found out until six months later. They were so unconcerned about the student body, they to this day know there is a ringer in our class photo, but have no earthly clue who it is. Hell, I bet over half my classmates couldn't tell you, either!

I tried electric razors with all sorts of lubricants, and my neck grew red like yours.

I found the best solution for me was to shave in the shower using a variety of stuff...gels, shampoo, or old style tube shave cream. I tried growing a beard once, and made it one week, before I shaved it off because it so itchy.

Sorry I missed it yesterday. I remember some of this story from before and I always enjoy hearing it again!

Any older, and you'd find it in Homer's Iliad!