Entry tags:
"Success for my Family, and Happiness"
Yesterday evening I was in the travel trance, in a soft leather seat at the front of a shiny brand-new coach between Luton and Oxford, teary-eyed from the random songs my iPod kept handing me like small gifts, looking at the sparkly lights of the English motorway system as we swung round a roundabout with a funny, jovial driver at the helm (when he got a straight, empty stretch of road he went "Wheeee!"), and a local bus pulled in in front of us with a sign on the back saying "Stuck in traffic? You could be shopping in Hemel Hempstead!" Wise bus. It's nice to be reminded to count your blessings once in a while.
*
6-7 October
Kyoto was one cool or pretty or awe-inspiring thing after another, most of it hard to put into words, so I didn't at the time.
( off-top-of-head Kyoto infodump: shrines, schoolgirls, spirits, spices and sake from a saucer )
If this all sounds stereotypical, that's the amazing thing about Japan: I wasn't expecting this, because I come from a country where the tourists I met as a kid seemed to be expecting pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, everyone wearing green and saying "Wisha" and not knowing what a computer was, but Japan is exactly what people say it is.
As we were walking to the station to catch the train to Tokyo, in the rain, we saw a man sitting cross-legged in a doorway. He had an umbrella which he wasn't holding over himself, but over the ginger cat sleeping on his lap.
Pictures are here.
*
6-7 October
Kyoto was one cool or pretty or awe-inspiring thing after another, most of it hard to put into words, so I didn't at the time.
( off-top-of-head Kyoto infodump: shrines, schoolgirls, spirits, spices and sake from a saucer )
If this all sounds stereotypical, that's the amazing thing about Japan: I wasn't expecting this, because I come from a country where the tourists I met as a kid seemed to be expecting pots of gold at the ends of rainbows, everyone wearing green and saying "Wisha" and not knowing what a computer was, but Japan is exactly what people say it is.
As we were walking to the station to catch the train to Tokyo, in the rain, we saw a man sitting cross-legged in a doorway. He had an umbrella which he wasn't holding over himself, but over the ginger cat sleeping on his lap.
Pictures are here.