When Yoko and I were married, we were married in Japan and obviously in Japanese. To prove that we are married in English, we had to translate our marriage certificate, which is no problem because the US Embassy in Tokyo has forms pre-printed for this specific purpose. You just fill in the missing information and when I did this for a report of Naomi's birth, they reprinted the translation nicely on some official looking paper. Because we were going to be in Tokyo this week, I thought I would finally take care of having this translation certified and filled out the form. When I was waiting at the embassy, I noticed that I made a small mistake and just wrote over it. No big deal, I thought, as this was all just getting transferred to the official looking paper. It turns out, what they do is just staple that form, the one I filled out, to the back of our marriage certificate. Now we have a very beautiful Japanese marriage certificate with my bad handwritten translation stapled to the back with the notary seal.
Now, I'm headed to the British Embassy and hoping it goes better. Yoko almost missed her train. It seems like we are going to England all beat up and bloodied, but alive and ready to study. I'm still waiting for the other shoe to drop — still wondering if this is real at all, that it might all fall through, that somehow I was mistaken and I didn't really get into the university and it's not really what I thought it would be.