Early March in Tokyo. Spring beckons. Shop windows display softer hues and lighter wares. Sitting still for a moment on a park bench. Wind blows, birds twitter, leaves rustle, traffic swirls, glides , scrapes, travels, presses into the narrow stream. Giant concrete rectangles, perforated with glazed eyes, silent, anonymous. Bright plum blossoms. Salary man, a silhouette beneath the tree between the office blocks, reads the paper and sips his beer. I read from a biography of Galileo. I'm in Padua, Firenze, Roma, Pisa. Where is the centre of the universe? Patrick flies west overhead home to Be [View Full Entry]

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Departure Three or four colours paint a wet morning aboard the commuter train, dark green for lush mountains, dark blue for shadows that hang beneath grey clouds and shiny brown slippery clay roof tiles. The rain has let up after nearly two days. In a sky more often ablaze and unnoticed, inexhaustible clouds, graceful, frenzied, fly onward. The streets, cars, bridges, buildings, all is clean and waking to a soft grey morning as though cement could bloom like an hydrangea. We are now travelling at 285 km/h, a steel serpent slipping through the mountains. Salary men seemingly dressed [View Full Entry]

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Arrival in August: humidity, typhoons, Atomic bombs and fireworks A fellow ALT, Assistant language teacher, who greeted us first years at Hiroshima airport, having just flown in from an initial 3 day seminar in a 5 star hotel in Shinjuku, told us we were lucky to be posted to Kure. Why then did the young man at customs in Tokyo, seeing where I was headed to, laugh and say, "oooh, countryside". I had practised over and over again how to greet my new boss in Japanese. Konnichiwa. Watashi wa Kebin desu. Dozo yoroshiku onegaishimasu. After gathering my luggage he approached [View Full Entry]

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My trip to Vietnam predates my purchase of a digital camera. Most pics of my first years in Japan and holidays in Asia now lie in plastic bound albums of 3X5s back in Canada. What remains appears fragmented much like my mind's recollection. I cannot recall the name of the guesthouse we stayed at in Hanoi. It was centrally located in Old Town, in the maze of store fronts displaying cheap barbers, motorcycle parts, water puppets, dingy eateries, morning baskets full of fruit and steaming pork buns, welders, butchers, dry food shops and beauty salons. The building was dark and several [View Full Entry]

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I spent three weeks travelling the major sights of Vietnam. The first week on my own, exiting the airport, I discovered for the first time the sweet sweaty smell of SE Asia, and fell in love instantly. I began the journey with a very helpful fellow in Saigon who introduced himself to me in the Backpacker's area, as a guide/ motor taxi driver. He had a notebook filled with other foreigners' reviews and pics. This was my first time to travel mainland Asia on my own. I used his services to explore west of the city as far as Cu Chi [View Full Entry]

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Apologies - currently unable to restore. If you have a backup please edit this entry and save/publish. There is a small possibility that this entry will be restored - only small. [View Full Entry]

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