first twenty-four hours...

My first 24 to 48 hours in a different culture (I mean a really different culture) tend to make me feel blind. There:s* a visual cacophony that the brain can:t process. Images reach the retina but aren:t perceived.

This happened a little in Thailand, first stop on my long-ago round-the-world journey, although Bangkok is enough of a global city that I could get my bearings to some extent. But I do remember having breakfast in the hotel cafe and just feeling a huge shock hit me like a brick wall. To stop my head from spinning, I left the cafe and just started walking, since I was on a major thoroughfare through the city (think Broadway)(only not at all like Broadway, starting with the orchids growing wild in the crooks of the trees). I walked about three miles before I felt human again.

But I had this experience in Nepal most intensely. I literally couldn:t process anything...the first time I left the hotel I felt like I was feeling my way down a wall in the dark, even though I was walking down the street in broad daylight. I was heading for a guidebook-recommended restaurant called "KC's" just a minute or two from the hotel. I remember catching sight of the restaurant:s sign, the only Roman lettering I saw, and latching onto it desperately, feeling like I was struggling toward it through some kind of storm or chaos--even though the chaos was all in my head as my brain struggled to make sense of anything, anything at all, that met my eyes.

This effect is of course much less in Japan, but still, when we walked out today and wandered a bit in the temple area, I was amazed at how many more details I saw that I had completely missed on the first day. I didn:t notice that there were gigantic straw shoes (at least one story tall) hanging on the temple gate (an offering from some locality or other), or that the whole end of the temple is decorated magnificently...or that there:s a garden on the west side...

And, speaking of the first twenty-four hours, here:s what I meant to blog from that day:

1) "Let:s never go home" - spoken after eating the most delicate, delicious, wonderful sushi ***ever*** in a total hole-in-the-wall bar...

2) "Let:s never go to Japan again" - spoken after two and a half exhausting hours at the train station, during which we struggled with train schedule books (which I kinda enjoy actually), were yelled at by Belgians, and then tried to figure out how two rotund foreigners were going to get around the country on trains built for teeny weeny people (how do sumo wrestlers survive, anyway? - maybe it helps to be a national icon)....final conclusion: rather than buying two expensive seats (wider) it:s actually cheaper to buy one cheap seat (beside the two we get for free with our rail passes) giving us a total of three cheap seats.... also known as, "our trip around Japan with our imaginary friend." Sheesh.

Tomorrow we go to Nagoya and my job as guide & interpreter (how we got to Japan in the first place) begins..... We:ll try to keep posting but as you know, life on the road is unpredictable.....

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*The colon (:) on this Japanese keyboard is in the same place that the apostrophe is on a US keyboard. I have been spending many precious minutes (as hordes of cranky impatient Europeans mill about waiting to use the sole computer of this establishment) going back and changing the colons for apostrophes. 'Nuffa that.