Time Travel
A few weeks ago a co-worker asked me if I believe in time travel; he'd been reading about black holes and the time-space continuum. Outside of the theory-of-relativity sense (which my gut still tells me is a load of crap), I told him no, I don't believe in it.
But after just returning from Japan for a week's vacation, I'm starting to reconsider. There's something undeniably novel while unavoidably jarring about flying halfway around the world. I left San Francisco last Wednesday at 11AM; after a 10-hour flight, I arrived in Nagoya, Japan, at 3PM on Thursday. Going to bed at midnight Japan time made it a 24-hour day for me. Yesterday - today? - I left Japan at 4PM Wednesday, had a 10-hour flight, and made it to San Francisco at 9AM. So after already having half of a day in Japan, I spent 10 hours working toward starting yet another day back in the US, an almost full work day. By the time I go to bed in two hours, I will have been up for 35 hours. I've had two breakfasts and two lunches and almost no sleep. Right now I'm just mentally thrown off; in a day or two will come the like-running-into-a-brick-wall physical side of the jetlag.
Getting to the point, the trip was awesome. In six and a half days we saw Nagoya (flew in there and spent a day exploring the city), Kyoto (home to hundreds of historic temples, shrines, and most of the remaining population of real-life geishas), Himeji (site of Japan's most famous original castle), Hiroshima (horribly heart-wrenching museum and monuments to the atomic bomb - I stood at ground zero), Nara (seven UN World Heritage Sites packed into one town), and Osaka (second largest city after Tokyo with 2.4 million people). The extensive train system, especially the high-speed shinkansen bullet trains (which are waaay cool), made getting around easy.
It certainly helped that on my flights, I got bumped up to Business Class not once, but twice - both on the way there and back, and man is that the way to travel: enough legroom to stretch out completely, a fully-reclining seat with footrest, great (both in quantity and quality) food, and bottomless drink supply. I also, uncharacteristically for me, watched some movies with audio: The Number 23 (pretty good; I really like Jim Carrey in serious roles), I Think I Love My Wife (moments of classic hilarity; I was in tears) and Breach (great true story). I also got completely sucked into Ayn Rand's 1957 classic Atlas Shrugged. She was recommended to me years ago by friends, but I never found the time to read the book until I recently learned that it served as partial inspiration for Bioshock's storyline. It's an 1100-page behemoth, but I can't put it down.
As usual when I visit other countries, I was enthralled with their un-American-ness. I feel so much more relaxed and at peace when I'm away from here. This trip was one more rung in the ladder that I hope to eventually use to climb out of here.
Wanting to avoid the pitfall of promising lofty and extensive commentary on the trip, as I naively did after Nicaragua, suffice it to say that there'll be a brief flurry of activity in the coming week as I recount some of the things I observed while there, as well as post links to pictures.
But after just returning from Japan for a week's vacation, I'm starting to reconsider. There's something undeniably novel while unavoidably jarring about flying halfway around the world. I left San Francisco last Wednesday at 11AM; after a 10-hour flight, I arrived in Nagoya, Japan, at 3PM on Thursday. Going to bed at midnight Japan time made it a 24-hour day for me. Yesterday - today? - I left Japan at 4PM Wednesday, had a 10-hour flight, and made it to San Francisco at 9AM. So after already having half of a day in Japan, I spent 10 hours working toward starting yet another day back in the US, an almost full work day. By the time I go to bed in two hours, I will have been up for 35 hours. I've had two breakfasts and two lunches and almost no sleep. Right now I'm just mentally thrown off; in a day or two will come the like-running-into-a-brick-wall physical side of the jetlag.
Getting to the point, the trip was awesome. In six and a half days we saw Nagoya (flew in there and spent a day exploring the city), Kyoto (home to hundreds of historic temples, shrines, and most of the remaining population of real-life geishas), Himeji (site of Japan's most famous original castle), Hiroshima (horribly heart-wrenching museum and monuments to the atomic bomb - I stood at ground zero), Nara (seven UN World Heritage Sites packed into one town), and Osaka (second largest city after Tokyo with 2.4 million people). The extensive train system, especially the high-speed shinkansen bullet trains (which are waaay cool), made getting around easy.
It certainly helped that on my flights, I got bumped up to Business Class not once, but twice - both on the way there and back, and man is that the way to travel: enough legroom to stretch out completely, a fully-reclining seat with footrest, great (both in quantity and quality) food, and bottomless drink supply. I also, uncharacteristically for me, watched some movies with audio: The Number 23 (pretty good; I really like Jim Carrey in serious roles), I Think I Love My Wife (moments of classic hilarity; I was in tears) and Breach (great true story). I also got completely sucked into Ayn Rand's 1957 classic Atlas Shrugged. She was recommended to me years ago by friends, but I never found the time to read the book until I recently learned that it served as partial inspiration for Bioshock's storyline. It's an 1100-page behemoth, but I can't put it down.
As usual when I visit other countries, I was enthralled with their un-American-ness. I feel so much more relaxed and at peace when I'm away from here. This trip was one more rung in the ladder that I hope to eventually use to climb out of here.
Wanting to avoid the pitfall of promising lofty and extensive commentary on the trip, as I naively did after Nicaragua, suffice it to say that there'll be a brief flurry of activity in the coming week as I recount some of the things I observed while there, as well as post links to pictures.
posted by GregP at 10:04 PM
2 Comments:
You mean "Breach"?
Ah, yes - corrected, thanks. I *thought* that looked a little strange.
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