Back home

Blogger has been a bit of a bee-yotch lately, so I wasn't able to post more before I left Tokyo, and now here I am back in Ottawa experiencing some pretty major jet lag. When I left Tokyo it was Monday afternoon at 5, and when I arrived in Ottawa it was still Monday, 7.30 in the evening, and I'm pretty certain that my flight was more than 2.5 hours long.

Mt. Fuji ended up being a bust, as I seemed to have caught the extended tail end of a rainy season in Japan that just doesn't want to end. Going to T's colleague's parents' place in the country was also a bust due to an illness in the family, so instead we went down to Koya-san, the holiest mountain in Japan, to stay in a Buddhist temple, eat surprisingly delicious vegetarian meals based mainly on tofu, and take part in a confusing, fairly unintelligible but wholly spiritual Buddhist prayer session. After visiting one of the largest and most beautiful cemeteries I've ever seen, we accidentally hiked down the mountain and hopped the train to Atami, where we stayed at a nice ryokan or traditional Japanese inn, complete with onsen and huge seafood meals.

Back in Tokyo it was a mad rush of trying to find some particular sandals and shoes and CDs that we wanted, photographing the freaks in Harajuku, and a goodbye dinner at Gonpachi (an izikaya or Japanese pub). There was some frantic burning of music and photos onto CDs, and then I left the next day.

I'm both happy and sad to be home. Not having any responsibilities other than to travel and experience as much as you can for 4 weeks is a freedom and a luxury that not many people can afford. However, there was a certain comfort knowing that I would be back in my own apartment among my own things in a city full of friends. I no longer have to consciously walk on the left, and I feel a sense of relief knowing that I won't have to aggressively force myself into the teeming mass of people at the subway station, only to be carried along helplessly in the flow of bodies. Tokyo has way too many people for its own good, and I'm happy to be back in the smaller population of Ottawa, where the people seem much taller, fatter and darker than the Japanese (not that that's a good thing.)

What I would like to do with this blog is provide a more complete update of everything that happened during my trip, as my scattered and erratic postings only capture a mere fraction of everything that I experienced. However, having been away for almost 30 days, and knowing myself to be the huge procrastinator that I am, I'm pretty sure I'll get about one-third of the way and then give up because there are other things to do, like friend's 40th birthday parties, and camping in Algonquin, and visits to Toronto. But I guess I have to give it a shot, because I need to have the record for myself (I have a sieve for a memory) and because someone needs to see all the pictures I took - there must be hundreds of them.

So, if you're still interested, keep coming back for a more detailed account of my trip, and other (hopefully) interesting happenings!