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We’ve posted a bunch of photos from our trip in this site’s photo gallery; click here to reach them. I took over 2000 photos during the excursion. Tracie waded through them and discarded the duplicates, blurred shots, mistakes, etc. We uploaded the rest to the gallery, organized by city or pairs of cities (e.g. the [...]

A few miscellaneous observations and recollections: Cleanliness Urban Japan is startlingly clean. The airports and train stations, including the tracks themselves, are basically spotless. The cities themselves are also devoid of litter, cigarette butts, fast-food wrappers, etc. I saw exactly one example of graffiti. One could speculate that they pay particular attention to keeping the [...]

As you may have already surmised, the vacation is over and demands of our usual lives and my two businesses have taken my attention away from this blog. There are many more things I could write about and many more photos I could post here (I took over 2000 of them, although I did at [...]

I haven’t yet posted photos from our day of touring Tokyo (or rather a tiny fraction of Tokyo) because of lack of time and energy. It was actually one of the most photo-heavy days in Japan; I took over 270 pictures that day. Here are a few of them. You may want to refer back [...]

I meant to include the following photo in my previous post, as an amusing example of the old and the new one sees in Japan:

Many of you may be faintly puzzled by this post. I admit that I’m faintly puzzled by my own fascination with beverage vending machines in Japan. I don’t think twice about vending machines in the USA, and I don’t drink many soft drinks. However, I was quite taken with the vending machines in Japan. Dan [...]

We are, at long last, safely home. The alarm clock woke us up in Kyoto almost exactly 27 hours ago as I write this. I don’t think either of us has slept more than a couple of hours since. Our already-long layover in San Francisco ended up being about eight hours because our flight was [...]

We’re about to check out and head home. This will be my last post from Japan but (as previously mentioned) not the last post about Japan. It’s been a good trip. Yes, it’s a major drag that Tracie is ill and that we have to cut the trip short. However, we did see some beautiful [...]

Today we spent the day in Nara, Japan’s oldest capital city. Nara is home to a huge Buddha statue (even larger than the one we saw in Kamakura) housed in the world’s largest and oldest wooden structure. (I wonder about the “largest” assertion, though; I thought that the old blimp hangars in Oregon were the [...]

First, a sitrep: we had hoped to fly home on Monday the 9th, but United was unable to accomodate this change. We’re now flying home on the 11th. Tracie’s condition seems to be stable for the moment. The silver lining to our cloudy situation is that we’re able to salvage some of our original plans [...]