An innocent abroad.

It is 6.23 on a beautiful clear sunny morning in Kyoto.  Outside my open window at the edge of the parking lot that is my view the delicate leaves of a Japanese maple reach up toward the sun.  Birds and trucks echo off the buildings outside, tea is steeping.  I am in Japan.

Holy shit.

If you know me, and I think everyone who reads this blog does, you know that I have wanted to be right here for about a decade.  Through a slightly tortuous series of events I am here, and I can still barely believe it.

I am returning to this blog after a year hiatus as a way to document and store images on this trip, and it is my intention to write every day or every other day, so check back every once in a while.  Tomorrow we are walking up to Kyomizu-dera, which I am sure will generate several thousand photos.  This morning I think I will just write quickly about our journey, and share a couple of funny images.

When I built furniture, my shop used to be not far from New Bedford Mass, which was the whaling capital of the US in its day.  Whaling ships set out from there bound for the Pacific, chasing the whale oil that made the Industrial Revolution possible.  A guy named Herman Melville shipped out of New Bedford on the Acushnet for a three year voyage and wrote a book about it that we all tried to avoid reading in high school:  Moby Dick.  If you have'nt read it, do so.  It is a great book.  Especially if you read it as a grown up who loves boats and history.  Which, upon reflection you may not be. 

Herman Melville did not go to Japan on that trip.

But as I sat on the plane at 32,000 feet crashing through the air at about 550 miles per hour I could not help thinking about all of the sailors and soldiers and adventurers who set out on journeys that have covered as much or more distance.  My colleague and I (I am co-teaching a study abroad class here, that is why I am here) chatted about long plane trips and the need to get up and move around a bit and my mind kept going back to the whalers, the sailors, the folk who traveled thousands of miles before me, but did it by sail, over the course of sometimes two or three years. 

Comparatively, fourteen hours does not seem like a lot.

Some of them cast lines and sailed off, returning to find that they had toddlers running around that they had never met.  Others returned to find family members dead or houses or towns burned down.  And they had no real way of communicating with home:  The best they could do was write letters and if they happened to pas a home-bound ship they could hand them off.  And if that ship did not sink, and if it actually reached its home port, and if the captain remembered to get the letter to someone who was going to the sailor's home town and if that person actually took the letter and delivered it, well, then the sailor's family knew where he had been about a month or so ago.  Slightly less precise than email and Skype.

So there we are, in an air-conditioned capsule far above the ocean drinking Heineken and talking about our respective levels of comfort, and it struck me that I need to have no attitude other than extreme thankfulness that I am who I am when I am where I am.  Here are some images from the flight and our arrival:

First in-flight meal:  Barbecued chicken.  So they said.

Last meal:  Noodles, they claimed.  With potato chips and raspberry filled shortbread cookies, natch.

 

 

Look how far we have come in just 200 years:  An individual screen for everyone with movies and tv in several languages tens of thousands of feet in the air.  Not sure if it is good or bad, but it sure is funny looking.

Sun setting over Kansai Airport.  I never had the night of May 12, you know.  We flew all into the sun all the way.

My "Western Style" room at the hotel, which is built in the machiya (townhouse) style.  I have three separate sets of slippers:  One for the room, one for the lobby, and one for the bathroom.  Thank goodness, you wouldn't want to wear the room slippers in the bathroom!

And this is how I finished out my day:  Sashimi and beer.  Holy jeebers.