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 tourist-heavy areas looking their best, but even the industrial/warehouse district on the outskirts of Kyoto that we passed through on the way to the airport was dramatically cleaner than, say, the outdoor mall in Boulder. read more

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 times make use of the auto-winder mode on my camera) but I’m afraid that it’s unlikely I’ll do so. I probably will put an assortment of photos in this site’s photo gallery at some point, but it will take us awhile to go through them and pick out the best ones. read more

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 to my first post about that day.

Here’s the view from our hotel room window:

Some shots from the grounds of the Imperial Palace:

Photos from the Meiji Shrine, starting with the tori on the way in: read more

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 and Richard will understand; I know that they share my fascination.

Vending machines are a very common sight in Japanese cities. There seems to be one on about every block (loosely speaking–not all of the cities we visited had “blocks” in the American-city sense of the word) and sometimes you find several at once. Here’s a photo of a large bank of them near the Meiji Shrine: read more

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 delayed–maybe because of weather, maybe because of equipment problems, maybe because of the flight crews being disgruntled with the CEO’s compensation and causing disruption in retaliation, depending upon which rumor you listened to. read more

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 and amazing things and when we ran down our unofficial list of things we wanted to do/see/experience/accomplish here we actually managed to hit most of them. We also know what we want to do when we come back. read more

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 largest wooden structures.) It’s also home to about 1000 sacred deer which roam freely in the park and are completely nonchalant about the presence of humans. I have to finish packing so I’m going to post the following photos without further comment. We leave for the long journey home tomorrow morning. read more

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 for our stay in Kyoto. Today we saw several of Kyoto’s major attractions with the guidance and assistance of a private guide who goes by the nickname Sid. (His real name is Makino but I am not sure whether or not that is his family name.) It was a long day and I’m fairly tired so I’m going to let photos do most of the talking. I shot about 300 photographs today. read more