P-to the-A-to the-R-I-S…

So, Paris, huh?

After having spent three days here (which, I’ll be the first to admit, is no nearly enough time), I’m boarding a plane tomorrow morning to head back to London where I will lay relatively low until about 7:30 PM when I’ll be attending a performance of Doctor Faustus at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre.

As you all know, I thought London (and the surrounding areas, for what it’s worth) was positively stunning. Paris? What did I think of Paris?

Meh. Simply meh.

Not saying that I regret it at all, but there were a couple of things that could have made my visit a little better:

1. More money. Sweet Jeebus, this city is pricy! I skipped eating at one of those famous cafes because I didn’t want to shell out 30€ for a meal just by my lonesome.

2. My wife. This city is all kinds of romantic and whatnot. Would have been nice to have the Lady here to share it with.

3. More time. Everything closes at strange times and days of the week, so you need at least a couple of weeks here in order to see everything.

Don’t misunderstand me though, I loved Paris and I’m thankful for having had the opportunity to come here, but I think that I should have saved this city for another trip in order to do it justice, you know? But this is, as you can tell, a delightful first world problem to have.

The first day I was here I simply walked around and got my bearings. It’s a relatively easy city to get around in, so experiencing Paris by foot isn’t exactly the worst idea. Lost a lot of tread on my shoes that day. Here’s a general rundown of how it went down.

Day 1: Saw the Eiffel Tower, the Arc du Triomph, Notre Dame

Day 2: Sacre Coeur, Musee d’Orsey, Eiffel Tower (elevator, bitches!), and The Military Museum/Les Invalides

Day 3: The Catacombs, The Louvre

As I get ready to pack my bags for my flight tomorrow morning, I am left with this overwhelming feeling like I am leaving Paris on a slightly-sour note. I expected to find a cosmopolitan European city filled with people celebrating a relatively recumbent (not physically, you perverts) lifestyle while enjoying the arts created by both their peers and those that came before them. I expected high-quality food and drink to be plentiful and easily accessible. I expected to find a place where history and the future combined to a swirling mass of creative energy that would inspire me and ignite my own creativity. What I found, unfortunately, was a bit different. In many senses, Paris is no different from any major city. The food is expensive, the Metro stations smell like urine (which, keep in mind, was not the case in London), itinerant ware-chuckers were hocking their shoddy merchandise with worse French accents than my own at every major attraction, and the people were, by and large, not fantastically friendly. But, once again, let me state the following to help your understanding:

Paris was freaking awesome. Seriously. Come here with someone you love. This shit’s a trip.

Paris does have one thing down pat: how to be French. From the omnipresent architectural themes, food and wine combinations, and serious cigarette smoking, this city knows how to uphold a stereotype. Another Parisian element that I was unaware of? All Parisians, and I mean that with 97.6453% certainty, are freaking gorgeous. Everybody between the ages of 18 and 50 in this city look like they walked right off of a magazine cover and into a subway station if only to shoot ugly foreigners (such as myself) bad looks. Seriously. If you’re wondering where all the Good Looking Genes went, they’re here.

That said, if you don’t already, follow me on Instagram (@doctorb42) for some of by better photos or click through one of my photos above to see my Flickr albums.

-B

Up to my ears in history…

About three minutes ago, I checked in at my hotel in one of the southern suburbs of Paris, France (not Paris, Texas, as some people might think…these two places are more different than one could imagine…the hats, for example, are completely different) and decided that before I head out for more Excitement, Adventure, and Really Wild Things, I would share a few of my thoughts looking back at my time spent in London and the surrounding British countryside.

Because, you know, you guys like reading that kind of stuff.

When I returned from my day tour yesterday to my host family’s home (sounds so foreign-exchange-studenty), we chatted over a pitcher of homemade sangria about all of the wondrous things that I’ve had the opportunity to experience over the last week and a half or so. All I could muster (at the end of the pitcher, anyway) was a cheeky-but-true declaration that went something like this:

“I’m up to my ears in history!”

In many senses, that was intended to be a joke. After all, history extends much higher than my ears. However, when looking back at England, I know I will forget the modern streets, efficient transit system, and everything else created after 1950 due to the fact that, as a general statement, so much of the chunk of human history that I’m interested in originated there. Take for example, Stonehenge.

Just look at that magnificent bastard.

That strange arrangement of rocks is well over five thousand years old and we still, STILL, have no real idea of what it was used for. My hopes of seeing Druids with Laser Staffs prancing about was quickly dashed against the rocks when I learned that this monument was erected long before those robe-wearing tree-huggers ever stepped foot on the island.

Then there’s this thing.

Yeah, that’s right. I’m taking a knee at Shakespeare’s grave. William Muhfuggin Shakespeare. The Bard. The man that elevated English theatre and poetry to where it is today (which is, in most scholars’ opinions, pretty darn high). His bones, his rattling corpse bits, were just feet away from where I stood. The Relics of Saints and all those other religious artifacts didn’t hold a candle to the man that changed the world with the power of his poetry.

But, as you might know from my other photos, be it via Twitter, Instagram, or my Flickr feed, history is astounding gorgeous sometimes and that beauty can often outweigh the historic significance of whatever it is you’re looking at. Take this place for example:

That’s Bath. Jane Austen lived there (who was a real classy broad, right?) and wrote her first and last novels there (Northanger Abbey and Persuasion, if anyone is counting). Dickens lived there. Loads of crazy rich people lived there and did all sorts of strange things, but history be damned, I didn’t care about any of that as much as I cared about that damn bridge and river. Seriously.

Either way, I look forward to many returns to the British Isles in my lifetime. There’s certainly so much more to explore and share with each of you that I have no choice but to go back. But, for now?

I’m off to see the Eiffel Tower, bitches.

-B

Pint of bitter, please…

Contrary to both popular belief and my recent Instagram (@doctorb42, if you’re interested) dumps, England has wifi in more places than just pubs.

I just happen to be in a large number of pubs with wifi. So this blog post will start off with my traditional greeting that I hurl at every bartender (or publican, if you want to be formal) I meet:

“Pint of bitter, please.”

Today marks the only serious, grave, and viscous disappointment of my trip so far. As you may or may not know depending on your level of conversation with yours truly, I am a bit of a lover (aficionado? nut? geek?) for Anglo-Saxon literature, and as such, I planned on visiting the British Library hoping to glimpse the one-and-only Beowulf manuscript that they are world famous for.

“Sorry. It’s been taken off of display for preservation purposes.”

I wanted to reach over the information desk at the Library and get on the intercom to demand whatever bespectacled, begloved, and bedoctorate-holding loon was responsible for taking this opportunity away from me and demand that they bring the pages, forthwith, for me to gaze upon. Instead, trying to blend in with the natives, I showed a stiff upper lip and said that I thought it was great that they were working so hard to preserve the text for future generations.

Bastards.

Other than that, the trip to the library netted some seriously great spy shots of rare works (Jane Austen’s writing book, first printing of the Canterbury Tales, and the MAGNA EFFING CARTA) and the opportunity to see countless other valuable works in their rare book collection that I would never have the chance to see. They also had a Science Fiction exhibit on (strangely missing any contribution from Douglas Adams, I am sad to report) that was quite entertaining and informative. But, without a doubt, they’re still bastards for keeping me away from my precious Wulf.

I also managed to get to the Tower of London today, the first major building commissioned by William the Conqueror in 1066, and see all sorts of Royal artifacts, including the Koh-i-nor diamond (which is about the size of a small satsuma, small fetus, or baboon fist, depending on your preferred source of size-reference). I had the pleasure of being guided around the facilities by a delightful old Yeoman Warder who regaled our tour group with enough lame jokes to stuff the corpse of Bob Hope. And, judging by the codpiece on Henry VIII’s armor, those kings are packing some serious heat IFYOUKNOWWHATIMEAN.

Yesterday, at the British Museum (clever names for these wonderfully free educational institutions, I know) I saw all kinds of major artifacts, chiefly of which was the Rosetta Stone (and if you don’t know what that is, it’s a large black stone that allowed us to translate Egyptian hieroglyphics…it’s kind of a big deal, you know?), which got me thinking: what are our Rosetta Stones that we use in everyday life? After all, the Rosetta Stone works because a recognizable Greek text (inscribed on the bottom) was translated into two different forms of Egyptian writing, so without it we might not be able to understand the writing of one of the world’s most historically significant cultures. In a way, it was like the back of a baseball card: it put the Egyptian languages into perspective in such a way to allow a quick and almost at-a-glance understanding of their unique system of representation (which wasn’t just pictographic, by the way).

In some senses, I feel like this trip is allowing me to uncover my personal Rosetta Stone. After all, I am an unapologetic anglophile that has put this British culture on a pedestal for most of my life, with regards to both popular culture and history. Maybe, just maybe, this journey across the Pond (a bit of a double entendre for all you Doctor Who fans…oh, Christ that was lame) was in some way designed for me to come closer with the symbol set, the language, that so much of my world-view had been developed around. In the end of it all, if we couldn’t read Greek, we couldn’t ever learn to read Egyptian. To draw a parallel, if I couldn’t come to understand England, I couldn’t really come to understand the person I claim to be.

Just a thought in a pub. Either way, this American is having one Hell of a time over here and misses each and every one of you (one of you more than all the others, she’d like to know), and I can’t wait to fill you all in personally in a week and a half’s time.

-B

London calling…

While sipping a pint of London’s Pride and awaiting my first batch of fish and chips (first of many, I’m sure), I’ve been fortunate enough to find an open wifi network.

So…

My flight to London was swiftly derailed as we began our journey over the Atlantic due to a woman becoming dreadfully ill in the seat behind me. So, instead of getting into London at noon, I arrived sometime after three in the afternoon, putting a pretty big time crunch on my first day here. But the chilly, overcast weather has put a much-needed spring in my step and I’m ready to get this trip moving.

Honestly, I’m having a bit of trouble reconciling the fact that I was in Japan only a handful of days ago. That country’s characteristic silence and homogeneity exists in stark contrast to London’s volume levels and multiculturalism. Two…wait…three continents in a single week makes for a very tired Me. Hopefully this food will bring with it renewed energy levels.

Tonight: get my bearings.
Tomorrow: Chaucer’s grave and lots of other historical…things.

-B

Yo-Yo in the Land of the Rising Sun…

It’s with great excitement that I release my latest yo-yo video here to you, my Dearest of Readers.

This video was filmed in Kyoto, Takayama, and Tokyo (with a particularly funny scene filmed in Hagiwara-Gero). It was entirely shot, edited, and uploaded through my iPhone 4.

Filmed by: Jason Walters
Music by: DVS NME
Yo-yo used: OneDrop Project Two

FEAST YOUR EYES UPON THIS, ME HEARTIES!

Not having it…

Two nights ago, Cassy, Jason, and I decided to hit up “Womb”, a wildly popular nightclub in Tokyo. For five or so hours, we danced to any number of fairly terrible trance songs with only a smattering of nausea-inducing drum and bass tracks to spoil the otherwise tolerable night of music. Our goal was to hit the club after the subway stopped running (at midnight) and leave the club when the trains started running again (5 AM-ish)…with enough booze and a sense of Asian Adventure (TM) we were able to accomplish this task.

But that isn’t the interesting thing. The interesting thing happened while we were sleeping off our ridiculous night of dancing and drinking.

Around 9 in the morning (give or take a couple of hours…I was dead asleep and I am currently too lazy to Google anything other than “Whimsical Otter Photos”), we were woken up by the rumblings of an off-shore earthquake that, by all reports, measured anywhere between 6.7 and 7.2 on the Richter Scale. Cassy and Jason woke up with a start and started to, reasonably, panic. How did I react?

“You weren’t having it,” Jason said at lunch the next day.

“You just weren’t having it. Any of it,” Cassy agreed.

Apparently, I woke up during the minute-or-so-long-earthquake-and-freak-out-session only to tell Jason and Cassy to, and I quote it as accurately as possible according to their testimonies, “shut the fuck up and fucking go back to sleep.”

That’s right, kids…in the middle of an earthquake in a disaster-shaken country I refuse to allow anyone, ANYONE, to fear the rumblings of the earth. Nay, good people, do not read my above comments as sleep-deprived profanity or Husbandly Neglect, but instead read them as the wizened words of a sage long past fuck-giving regarding the shifting of tectonic plates. Or, if you chose, read it as the comments of a man who stayed up way to late for his age (and past his interest in bad club music) and who refuses to let anything, even the earthiest of quakes, to stand between him and sleep.

It’s fitting, I feel, that I spend my final night in the Land of the Rising Sun staying up way too late writing this blog post. After all, this trip is just the first of two major trips I plan on taking this summer (in case I haven’t bragged enough, London/Paris is on deck for next week) so I should just embrace the fact that I won’t return to anything resembling a proper sleep schedule until sometime in August after the jet lag has shaken itself off like an over-fed tick. In this post, I wanted to relay some sort of story about how Tokyo is everything I love about big cities and so much more, but all you will get is the following few sentences.

Deal with it.

Tokyo a ridiculously easy city to get around in, it’s remarkably safe, has loads of Big Bright Shiny Things, and the people speak a language that makes my head feel like it’s filled with oyster crackers and spare change. So, in the spirit of brevity, here’s an overly-generalized run down of what we’ve done/seen in Tokyo so as not to make this the Longest Blog Post in All of History Ever:

Akihabara: bought this sweet rig. Make fun of me later, but it’s been a shitload of fun to mess around with.

Harajuku: Gwen Stefani, you were not wrong about this place.

Tokyo Tower: ridiculous paint job. Great lens flares.

Imperial Palace: great late-night park in which to get drunk. Deliciously hobo-free.

Some Fish Market: best sushi I’ve ever had. Period.

Lots of other stuff, too, but I’m a bit on a J-Overload at the moment, so I’m sure I’ll relay more of the details later. This blog isn’t meant to be a day-to-day record anyway, but instead a place for reflection and stories about how I couldn’t have cared less about earthquakes and the tsunamis they could potentially generate. Tomorrow at around 4 PM J-Time, we’ll be boarding a plane bound for cheerful Minneapolis and, eventually, Denver. If over the next few days you want a personal photo slide show (do people still do those?) I’ll entertain the possibility of giving you one if I can just press play and sleep on the couch under a fleece throw.

What? If I sleep through and earthquake, I’ll sleep through a slideshow. Just saying.

-B

Screw those things…

At this point in time, there are three relatively tall gringos (or gaijin, I believe the term is) stuffed into what is possibly the smallest hotel room in existence. No, we aren’t staying in a capsule hotel, but we might as well be.

On the drive to Tokyo, a six-hour drive filled with hilarious podcasts and countless rounds of Marry/Fuck/Kill, we attempted to visit the Great Sedimentary Pimple that is Mount Fuji, but the torrential rainfall characteristic of summer prevented us from glimpsing it. Sadly, that means that our detour from our Tokyo-bound path was for nothing more than quick bite to eat and a few minutes of me staring at one of the squatting toilets deciding whether or not this was the time I was going to try it out.

It wasn’t. Screw those things.

For the most part, our plans for Tokyo are the exact opposite as our plans in Kyoto and Hida. In Kyoto, we soaked up culture and history in the form of the countless temples and shrines that dot the city like an outbreak of Religious Acne. The food in Kyoto was top-notch and positively brimming with noodles. In Hida, we spent more than a few days sitting around in local hot spring baths called onsen (or as Cassy calls them, “nudie baths”) in order to soak out the pains and sprains earned in the many long, arduous battles with Daytime Drunking. Or Drinking, depending on your point of view. Or the number of chu-hi’s you’ve drank. Google that shit, chu-hi. It’s vicious, cheap, and available at any convenience store (or, as pronounced by everyone I’ve met here, “combeeni”).

Tokyo should be a metropolitan orgy of shopping, eating, and subway-riding. Needless to say, I’m stoked to visit Akihibara for the technological side of things. Cassy? You know she’ll be taking the first train to the Harajuku district for all kinds of strange-ass J-Fashion.

Tonight we’ll be hitting up a club called “Womb” (Jason says it was in the movie “Babel”, but who knows what kind of fresh Hell he’s talking about) from about 12-6 AM due to the fact that THAT’S WHEN THE TRAINS STOP. So, looks like I’ll be sleeping this one off tomorrow.

Oh, I’m almost done with my yo-yo video that I’ve mentioned absolutely nothing about so far. So there’s that.

-B

The Case of the Familiar Book

Things I’ve learned so far:

1. My natural volume is way too high for this place. I should quiet my ass down.
2. Stay on the left. Seriously. Escalators, sidewalks, everywhere.
3. No open container laws means being able to walk around with cheap, sweet boozy-bits.
4. Japan is frenetic, strange, and wholly welcoming.

After arriving in Japan…what, three or four days ago… I’ve done nothing but soak in history, tradition, and noodles. We managed to hit up shrines and temples between visits to noodle shops and shops named (among other things) “Titty”.

If you’ve followed my journey on Instagram (@doctorb42), you have no doubt seen all of the neat photos I’ve been able to catch on my trip out here. I’ll try to collect a few of the best at the bottom of this post.

When my wife and I arrived at our friend’s home, I was quickly introduced to the novel pictured below. As a man with a Hitchhiker’s Guide tattoo, I was excited to see a novel that I have read dozens of times presented in a language that I possess a Remarkably Limited Understanding Of. But, regardless of that fact, I do know exactly what goes on between those inversely-organized pages.

A long time ago, a Frenchman with a magnificent crop of facial hair suggested that the human mind processes symbols and signs through relating the representation and what that sign is interpreted to represent (classically presented as the relationship between the signifier and the signified). Usually, this means that we recognize red traffic signs as instructions to stop (pretty much the same in Japan) on a pretty much universal level. In nearly every case, the only ambiguous component of that relationship is the signifier (this is the genesis for that all-too-frustrating phenomenon known as interpretation.

In the Case of the Familiar Book, I know precisely what this story represents — the signified — but I am currently at a complete loss as to how to process the signifier. As a foreigner in a land with a completely unrelated language in relationship to my own, I find that this experience happens hundreds of times each day. Even without knowing how to consume the local language, most elements of the human experience can be presented and recognized, leading to a more comfortable and familiar experience. Before I saw that book, before I flipped open the thin pages to look at vertical rows if indecipherable code, I consciously felt a linguistic disconnect in Japan.

After the Mustachioed Frenchman came any number of White Haired Frenchmen who recognized experiences like mine as the truth, that sometimes the relationship between signifiers and signifieds can be expanded upon, modified, and even reversed. As any traveller will tell you, this is one of the best parts of visiting a a another country.

Just a thought…

-B

A few thanks…

In about…*pssshhht*…three or so hours, I’ll be winding my way through the Great Leviathan of Inconvenience that is the security screening checkpoint of the Minneapolis/St. Paul airport getting ready to board a large metal flying tube destined to land in Japan half a day later.

Needless to say, I’m pretty stoked.

Not about the flying bit, mind you. I just managed to get over my fear of flying sometime last year by thinking of Battlestar Galactica. You know, if we do find ourselves entrenched in a terrible, bloody war with a race of sentient robots, I might have to fly a plane and shoot those Toasters down. But you didn’t come here to read about my special overcome-your-fears-through-a-series-of-increasingly-improbable-series-of-events theories, did you?

My wife and I have been planning this trip to visit our friend that teaches English in Japan for quite some time (since October 2010, to be specific), and this trip could not have come at a better time. For the last year, I’ve been challenged as a teaching professional and as a writer more than I have ever been, resulting in a latent stress level that only long flights and culture shock can correct. In many senses, this blog was created with all of my summer’s travel in mind.

In the spirit of brevity (a spirit that does not often fall from either my fingertips or lips, as you might know), I just want to extend a sincere thank you to all of the people that will make this experience absolutely amazing. First, let it be known that my magnificent wife is the Queen of All Travel and without her I wouldn’t be brave enough to go anywhere, let alone somewhere that requires a passport for entry. She’s a brilliant woman and the best traveling companion I could ever hope for. Second, a huge thanks goes out to Mr. Jehu Love, a man with a ridiculously appropriate nom de plume that will be our guide in the Land of the Rising Sun. He’s welcoming us into his home-away-from-home and shuttling us around from temple to ramen bar to sushi joint, so he receives the highest of all fives.

Lastly, thanks to all of my wonderful friends and readers back home who give me a reason to share all of the awesome stuff this month abroad (Japan followed by Europe) is bound to produce. So stay tuned, you beautifully literate people…neat stuff is about to happen.

-B

I’ve seen…

I’m pretty sure if I Googled what I just ate, I would find a scarier calorie count than I’m truly prepared for. On this, the third (or fourth…time and space are mysteries whose comprehension requires more energy than I am prepared to give) day of our student trip to San Francisco and Thereabouts, we’ve managed to shuffle our gaggle of kids around Alcatraz and Fisherman’s Wharf with the Golden Gate Bridge to come.

I’ve been pleasantly surprised how few behavioral issues we’ve had to remedy this trip. If in the course of a school year the biggest issue I had to deal with was a runaway sense of negativity, I would be able to spend much more time actually teaching my content area than I currently do. If wishes were horses, right?

One thing that I’ve been trying to push my budding writers to do on this trip is to spend more time writing down careful observations of people they encounter or see on the trip in lieu of the standard tell-me-about-your-day style of journaling. Right now, here at the Wharf, nothing would make me happier than spying a few of my students staring into a crowd of people only to latch on to one or two passers-by and record every salient fact and observable quality.

In a sense, I’m trying to quietly pass on one of the best pieces of writing advice I’ve ever received. Observe, record, interpret, repeat. While writing this post, I’ve spent nearly half an hour watching people walk up and down the Wharf carrying ice cream cones, coffee cups, small children, and plenty of extra baggage. I’ve seen an old man who can’t walk five steps without having a serious internal battle about whether or not he should ogle the seemingly endless supply of teenage girls. I’ve watched a whole slew of small clone families stuff any number of spawn into a smaller number (confusing, I know) of luxury strollers and baby holsters. I’ve watched at least two people try to eat chowder out of bread bowls while walking (with, sad as it is to say, no comically scalding results). I’ve watched an old man smoke a Peterson pipe, a young woman drop her phone three times, and a twenty-something-year-old man pour about a cup of cocoa powder into three different cups of coffee (from different coffee stands, no less).

In a word, I’ve seen nearly everything this small stretch of boardwalk has to offer. I wonder how many other people are doing the exact same thing.

Personally, I don’t want to venture a guess.

-B