Man, it’s been a long week. With two very important meetings yesterday and today, the past five days have been a blur of pre-meetings, PowerPoint presentations, business cards and cheap hookers (well, maybe not that last one).

The good part is that the meetings went well and may have laid down the groundwork for some major global expansion in the next five years. The bad part is that I’m soon to expire from exhaustion any minute now. . . a two-hour train ride to my former office in Ibaraki and a two-hour ride back, both yesterday and today. . . three hours of sleep last night because my boss absolutely needed the minutes from the first meeting by the following morning and apparently assumed that transcribing 8 hours of detailed discussion would be a breeze for me, since “Jeff, your English is so good!”. . . and then, when I went to give him the minutes I had stayed up half the night working on, he decided that he doesn’t need them until Monday after all (!).

I can’t wait to just close my eyes and sleep.

Before that, however, an aside: this week I was reminded that living stereotypes are alive and well. The guests visiting my company were all very nice people, however they completely fit the mold of the stereotypical American: they were overweight, they were loud, they ate chocolate bars for breakfast, drank nothing but Coca Cola, and despite being visitors in a country known for its exotic and tasty cuisine, opted to eat at steakhouses both of their nights here instead of sampling the local fare.

All of my hard work throughout the past three years of trying to rid my coworkers of their misconceived notions about Americans — down the drain in a mere 36 hours. . . .