about me
Hi. My name is Kirk Boodry. I am an American in Japan. I was tranferred here from New York. I thought I would be here three weeks, but it has been six years and counting!
I am originally from San Diego, California, but I have lived all over the place, including NYC, Alaska and, now, Tokyo. I am tempted to say London too, because I used to spend a great deal of time there.
I love to read, cook (when i am not lazy) and see new things (as long as they aren't too disgusting). As I think of new good things to say about myself, I will update this.
about this site
At first I thought this would be a good place to complain about everything in my life, but I realised that people might be reading it, especially the ones that I am complaining ABOUT. So, I will continue to do that at the pub and instead use this as a place to share some of the interesting things that are happening to me. This should also help you figure where I am and what I am doing (and why I am always so bad about calling back to the US).
Some people have asked how I chose the name for this site. Sarukoen is almost Japanese for "Monkey Park". I say almost because I am not really very good with Japanese and I went off and started this blog before figuring out whether the name was correct. Oops. Anyway, if you can get past that I can explain my logic at the time.
First of all, I was born in the year of the monkey, so I have always had an affinity for monkeys. (Seriously! When I was in high school, my friends and I had a plan to make our own beer which we planned to call "Blue Monkey".)
Anyway, when I was really, really new to Japan, I went to a place called Takao-san and there is a monkey park there (it is actually called "Saruen", but that does not sound as cool as Sarukoen). You can pay admission and walk around with the monkeys etc (very cool!). One of the signs inside the park caught my attention as it had two of the katakana/letters that I could read: "カ" (ka) and "ク" (ku), which is how my name is pronounced in Japanese when you put them together (カーク）. Unfortunately, I could not read anything else on the sign, which said "The oldest monkey in this park is Kaku (カク)". How did they know I would be there?
Unfortunately, "カク" is no longer the oldest monkey in the park, but his legacy lives on...as the picture below shows.
