It recently struck me, while standing in the candy aisle at my local super market, that living in a foreign country is a lot like being a kid again. It reminded me of standing in the candy aisle at my local Thrifty Drugs in Foster City, California. I must have been 7 or 8, and I wanted to taste it all. I wanted to work my way through every candy bar, every bag of caramels and M&Ms, every package of gum.

That’s what living in Japan is like, accept instead of just the candy, it’s everything. It’s entire stores of untasted foods, street upon street of unvisited restaurants, entire maps’ worth of untraveled lands. I want to see it all. Like a child, everything is new.

And also like a child, I am outside the culture. For kids, the world of adults is unknowable, a strange, distant place. It’s like that for me. I exist in the same space as the people I see around me and yet I am apart. Language plays a large part in this division. The more I can speak Japanese, the more I can participate. I can go from just buying that candy bar, to talking to the clerk about it and asking for recommendations.

And, like a child, I am becoming literate. Every day I increase my ability to read the world around me. The gulf of unknown kanji grows ever smaller. That sign that perplexed me last week now reveals itself to be an advertisement for an apartment rental agency. The place across the street from the grocery store? They cut hair, I can now read.

But mostly, like a child I am full of endless enthusiasm. There is so much new to experience, so much to do and see and taste. It is a wonderful position to be in, wonderful all the more so for the wisdom I have to know that this state will not last forever.