In just two days, I’ll be headed off to Japan again! Finally, for the first time since our trip seven years ago. Just me for this trip, though.
Originally, planning for this trip started as another SpockSoc trip, but everyone who’d originally expressed interest pulled out one by one until it was just James and I left. We decided to just go with the two of us anyway, but when it came time to nail down the actual itinerary, we hit a small snag – I wanted to go this year (partly because some things I wanted to do are only on now, partly to get the contrast between the summer of our last trip with winter now, and partly from sheer impatience), while James preferred to go next year (partly because he’s used up much of his leave for this year, and partly because winter is cooold). I pondered for a while how to resolve this deadlock, until I came up with a sudden brainwave:
So, I’m going on my own now, and we’ll go again next year, probably in the Easter holidays. Soon as we can make plans. I’m taking the opportunity on this trip to visit a few places that are high-up on my extremely extensive “places I’d like to visit” list, but are a little bit further from the beaten path, so I don’t have to feel guilty about dragging James off on a three-hour train trip.
I’m hoping for some pretty nice weather – a lot of my plans are outdoors, with no real contingency plans. One of my favourite sightseeing methods is to simply go wandering down whichever street or alleyway catches my eye, so you’ll probably find I’ll be doing a lot of that this trip. I’ve also gotten a better hold on how to blog more easily, so unless I’m extremely busy, expect to see in-line photos for every post. Still haven’t learnt the trick of blogging more concisely, though.
Sadly, I never got around to going back to adding photos to the posts from our previous trip. I have, however, made a digital scrapbook out of both of our photos and an edited version of the blog text. If you’d like, you can view the pages from it on Facebook – you don’t need to be friends with me to view them, but you do need to be logged in. At least, last I checked – let me know if it’s not working. It’s actually a twelve-inch-by-twelve-inch printed book, so the pages on Facebook are a little small – if you’re geographically close to me in Real Life and want to see the real thing, just ask me sometime.
I confess I’m a little bit nervous about this trip – while I have learnt Japanese, my listening ability is still not great, and it’s my first solo trip to a non-English speaking country. My itinerary is all pencilled in, but I won’t know if it’s actually going to work (or if I’m going to run out of daylight every day) until I actually try it – fortunately, aside from my hotels, only one or two things are fixed to a particular day, so I can rearrange as weather or energy levels require.
Just a day and a half to go…
