Well, in 8 days I’ll be boarding my flight to Japan. This will be my longest solo venture since I drove across a big chunk of the US back in 2003 (you can see my blog entries from back then in Nerdtour 2003, if I did the pages right).
I’m a little anxious about it, as usual, but also I’m looking forward to it, I’ll be checking a lot of things off my bucket list, at least the international one. I have a lot of things left to see in the US, which I’ll start on once I get back. Well, after resting up and letting my bank account cool off for a while!
Well, here we go again, I’m getting ready to start another trip to Japan, this time it’s going to be a big one! Since I retired last year, I’m not going have the income to be a world traveler anymore, so I decided to make a final grand adventure to the Land of the Rising Sun, lasting 2 whole months! There was going to be a trip in 2023, but layoffs happened and spurred my retirement, then discovering I had 4 blocked cardiac arteries meant I had to get those re-routed. That laid me up for a bit, but I still thought I could make a trip in Spring of 2024, but again events conspired, and I didn’t feel comfortable making the trip so soon (8 months) after my major surgery, so I figured I’d better get healthier before setting off in ’25. Since then I started walking a lot, lost a lot of weight, put my diabetes into remission, and got a clean bill of health from my doctors.
Given all that, and checking my finances, I decided that this year would be my best chance to once more visit Japan during cherry blossom season. Since it may well be my last, given my financial situation, I figured I’d go all out and stay for 2 months, so that hopefully I can see enough of Japan for the rest of my life. After nearly kicking the bucket in ’23, it’s time to check things off my bucket list!
So, starting on March 22, I leave for Tokyo, where I’ll have an apartment for the duration as a base of operations for whatever trips in Japan that I can squeeze in during the time. Oh, and I promise that I will try to blog more often than I did during Nerdtour 2018, since I’ll have more time, and I don’t plan to exert myself into exhaustion like I did back then!
Well, I was here in Tokyo for fireworks on my birthday, but Nature conspired to send a typhoon my way, which forced Tokyo to delay the fireworks. It wasn’t a total washout, I did manage to celebrate by going to Akihabara, which turned out to be much closer to my apartment than I originally thought, only a couple of stops on the subway. The fireworks will go off today, Sunday, but I had already made other plans for this evening, so I’ll end up going to one of the other Tokyo fireworks displays they have over the next couple of weeks.
And I don’t mean the song by Buster Poindexter from years ago, I mean the thermal climate has been ridiculously, dangerously, even deadly hot here in Japan.  The day after I got here, Monday, I had to go in from Narita down to Shinjuku, Tokyo, to pick up the key to my apartment, and it happened to be the hottest day so far.  My buddy John and I took the Narita Express train to Shinjuku, which was nice and comfortably air conditioned, but once we got off the train and started heading through the station, it wasn’t so nice.  We checked luggage into coin lockers (wonderful convenience that would never be permitted in Paranoia, USA) in Shinjiku station and walked out into the blast furnace/sauna.  It’s only a kilometer or so to the Sakura House apartment office from the station, but it only took about 5 steps to break into an unending sweat.  There were people all over handling the heat however they could, but no one was stopping the city from running.  It might have seemed to be moving a bit slower, though.
Once we got our keys we headed back to the station and got our respective loads of luggage from the lockers. Â I only recently figured out where the word “luggage” comes from, after lugging around my suitcase and helping John with his 4(!) bags in the heat. Â We were able to make the train, getting on a direct line to Monzen-nakacho, the neighborhood where the apartments are, riding the Metro with wonderful air conditioning. Â Once back outside, we discovered that the taxi stand we were expecting was no longer there, which meant a long, hot, miserable haul of luggage down the street to the apartments, “only” a couple of kilometers. Â Buildings A and B are only 3 floors high, which means there were no elevators, so I had to haul my single suitcase up to my room on the 3rd floor. Â Fortunately the air conditioning worked, and I turned that thing on as high and as cold as I could make it, to bring the apartment temp down to something approaching relief.
After collapsing in a puddle in the lone chair, I turned on the TV to see what was on, and happened on a special program where they were discussing the weather. Â I learned that we had been hauling our stuff around in temperatures over 41 degrees C, with humidities over 50%. Â I don’t know what that made the “heat index”, but 41 C is over 105 F, which is hot all by itself without the added misery of humidity.
At any rate, we survived, and I crashed in my apartment about 9 PM, after getting some drinks, a towel so I could take a shower, and a bit of food at the convenience store down the street. Â That should have been enough hauling around for the week, but no, I had plans for Tuesday…
So, I thought I’d try to be a little artistic with another one of my photos from Japan. I see all kinds of “art” photos where the photographer uses grainy black and white, so I thought I’d do the same with one of my more-or-less “artistic” photos, converting the nice clean crisp color photo to this B&W thing. This is a shot of one of the platforms at Tokyo Station. I was headed to Yokohama for the day, and it was well past rush hour so there was hardly a person there. “Crowded Tokyo” is very selective in its appearance.
I don’t know if this works as “art” or not, since I’m not an artist, but here it is anyway! I guess it kind of looks like an old photo, or something…
Chinatowns in all big cities are pretty much alike, but the one in Yokohama is very colorful at night, just like most of urban Japan, and much more so than the DC Chinatown. Here’s a prime example:
Urgh, I’m now on day 2 of a crappy head cold. It’s a little disheartening to learn the hard way that not all Japanese care enough about the people around them to cover their faces when they have a cold. In walking through crowds to and from stations, or standing on tracks in a crowd waiting for a train, I’ve seen a lot of people wearing the “surgical masks”, to keep from spreading their colds via coughing or sneezing. Unfortunately, some people in the crowds have not been so considerate, and I’ve been standing near people who let loose with a cough or sneeze, leaving their clouds of mucus and viruses for others to walk through. It’s hard to avoid them, too, when you basically have to keep moving behind them, or have to grab the hanging straps that have been grabbed by untold others.
At any rate, it hit me Monday evening, the sneezing, the runny nose, the crappy feeling. Tuesday I stayed in the apartment until the evening, when I decided I needed to get some kind of cold medicine, and some food and something to drink. A quick Google search of the expat sites for advice, a little research with my iPhone dictionary app, and I was ready to head to one of the local drugstores ( 薬屋, kusuri ya, literally “medicine shop” ) for some head cold medicine ( 風邪薬, kazegusuri, cold medicine ). I wanted something specifically for the symptoms I had, sneezing ( ãã—ゃã¿, kushyami ) and runny nose ( 鼻水, hanamizu, literally “nose water” ^_^ ). Fortunately I was able to convey this to the pharmacist, who pointed me to a box of something that had most of the words, and double-checked with him to make sure.
So, fortified with hope, I stopped at a combini to pick up dinner and some juice and soda. Different convenience stores stock different things, but they all have a hot food, cold food, and drinks section, so I picked up a tonkatsu meal, which is a fried pork cutlet, on scrambled egg and rice, and a bottle of Kagome vegetable juice. On the way back I passed a vending machine that carried hot and cold drinks, and so I decided to try a “hot lemonade”. Sure enough, a bottle of lemonade came out of the machine, very warm. I bought two, and they were still warm when I got back to the apartment. I drank the bottles of hot lemonade with the cold pills, and as I was eating the tonkatsu, the medicine started working on my cold. I called it an early night a few hours after that, but had to wake up a few times during the night with more sneezing.
Today, Wednesday, I’m feeling a bit better, the cold is still with me but not as bad, and the cold pills are doing their job. I figure I should be back up and about by tomorrow. Hopefully I just caught the same cold everyone in Tokyo seems to have, so that I have immunity and don’t have to worry about it anymore. We’ll see.
Here’s my magic combination that seems to be working on my cold!
So, almost everything put away that can be put away, one last batch of clothes in the laundry, and the apartment passed muster with the apartment management. Â Boarding passes printed for DCA and DFW, have to pack some things and repack others. Â So, a quick bite while the clothes tumble and then it’s nap time for a couple of hours. Â Ah, who am I kidding, there’s no way I’ll be able to sleep, I’m too hyped up! (which, if you know me, doesn’t appear much different from when I’m calm, but trust me, there’s adrenaline flowing!)
