Tokyo a success

My current liquidity amounts to 312 yen, which buys me at Narita twenty minutes of Internet and a very small soft drink, so this will be short. Did remarkably little on Boxing Day: five hours by train up the west coast of Taiwan, which is essentially a single city, and then the sky was too grey and dismal to make it worth going up Taipei 101 again.

I've followed rezendi's itinerary in Tokyo fairly closely: train to Asakusabashi by way of Chiba City -- the sky was the colour of a particularly tacky cocktail, peach-melba sunset fading to curacao evening. Next day, the Meiji shrine (wonderful calm, wooden buildings utterly devoid of bright-turquoise ceramic rooftop dragons in a dense artificial forest), a Yamanote trip one stop east done on a west-bound train to see all Tokyo, the views (including Fujiyama at sunset) from both towers of the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building One, sushi in Ginza, refrained from vastly over-running my credit card limit buying second-hand camera lenses in Akihabara (somebody with a complete Canon collection must have recently died), back to the hotel and so to bed. The weather's been gorgeous in a sort of freeze-dried winter way; bright blue skies, bright sun, temperature about five degrees.

Today, every museum in Tokyo is shut, so I wandered around Ueno Park and admired ducks, shrines, doorways, the six gigantic, reputedly-fantastic and very shut museums, cormorants, ancient burial mounds, the fifty-eight large copper lanterns given as gifts to Tokogawa, and the like, before heading to the airport. I plan, employment and liquidity permitting, to be back in Japan for Worldcon 2007, and to see more then, if it's open.

I am about to spend eighteen hours on flights and in airports. I hope, my readers, that you all have more interesting times than I in the next eighteen hours.

I am in Canada

My luggage, however, y-compris the Useful Folder of Bits of Paper containing the details of my travel insurance for such events as my luggage parting company with me, is not. I thought that the transit process at Chicago, which consisted of being told 'ah, Air Canada, stick it in this pile', was a little lackadaisical.

Air Canada assure me that they have found the luggage, and tell me it should arrive tomorrow; until it does, I'm relying on papersky's hospitality in the matter of spare toothbrushes, loaned fleece trousers and the like. In any case, I have a credit card, clothing is not hard to come by during the end-of-year sales in Montreal, and it's possible that the travel insurance will buy the clothing for me and repay papersky handsomely for the use of her spare toothbrush.

As to the date and time on this message, I've travelled eleven timezones eastwards and crossed the International Date Line since the last one; this is the second 29th December 2005 that I've experienced since waking up.