In December 1981, I was standing on the sidewalk in San José, Costa Rica while watching the Tope parade. A marching band clad in blue uniforms pounded away on their instruments. I looked out amongst the band members and spotted my mate Glen Snyder blowing away on his trombone while keeping in step.
Glen and I had arrived in country six months earlier as Peace Corps Volunteers assigned to environmental education projects. Glen lost no time and had already integrated himself into his local community and joined the municipal band. I was impressed.
I didn’t see much more of Glen after that. We got involved in our projects and immersed ourselves in our own Costa Rican worlds. Our paths would cross when the American ambassador threw a Fourth of July party, or the Peace Corps pulled us all in for some sort of meeting.
Glen became a teacher and remained in Costa Rica. He married a Tica and had kids. After 13 years he moved back to the States and got a PhD in geological sciences. Then he moved to Japan about a decade ago to help a local university discover some secrets of the ocean floor.
Padma and I had a long layover in Tokyo on our flight home from the States. Glen was in town and met us at the airport and gave us a whirlwind tour of his adopted city. Glen brought us to the less-touristy Kanda neighbourhood when he settled us into an Izakaya and ordered a meal for us in what sounded like fluent Japanese to us. An izakaya is a small restaurant/bar fitting no more than 10 or so people. Padma and I had watched every episode of ‘Midnight Diner’ so we knew what we were getting into.
The sake flowed as we ate tempura and soba noodles. It’s hard to summarize 40 years of life in one evening but we did our best to catch up and had fun reminiscing about our first months as Peace Corps Volunteers.
It was our first visit to Japan and only lasted 18 hours. But it was enough of a teaser to lure us back. Glen invited us back to join him on explorations of rural, less travelled parts of Japan. We promised we would visit but not wait another 40 years again before we meet up again.
