My friends have been bugging me for an update since I haven’t been posting much lately. So I suppose it is appropriate for me to declare a return to health, and that I am not going to die. My horrible rash has pretty much disappeared, it was not Toxic Shock or anything fatal. I’ll ascribe it to either a toxic shellfish I ate (it was delicious anyway), or perhaps to overwork from too much walking.
I have so much to post about, but I figured I should wait until I get home and can put up with photo galleries with the stories, my busted laptop is not up to the task. And my hotel’s Mac is difficult to use, the Japanese keyboard has the punctuation in all the wrong places, it’s OK for short posts, but for lengthy writing, it drives me crazy.
As I discussed in an earlier post, I decided to take along Mark Twain’s “Innocents Abroad,” and his travelogues usually set the tone for my own travel writing. I got to about chapter 2, and Twain makes extensive remarks about how the burden of writing a travel diary is the worst curse one could wish upon a tourist. I’ll have to dig up the exact quote, it was hilarious, and it seemed like a sensible warning. So I pretty much gave up on daily diary writing, and I even stopped reading Twain’s novel. I can either focus on experiencing Japan, or on writing about it. And I have been places where no gaijin has gone before. I can’t wait for this trip to end, so I can write about it all.