In the summer of 2002, I was in Japan for World Cup Soccer. I got an assignment from a newspaper in Ireland, The Southern Star, to go and meet people in Irish bars in Roppongi and report on what people were saying. Oh, yeah. Ireland was in the World Cup at the time. And oh, yeah. We used to live in Ireland, that was before DK moved to Seattle.
Another life. Another world.
Today I was talking with JJ about how it is living in different countries, and the things you see and how it is when you can’t quite express your point of view fully and passionately and, well, without much thought. You can just throw out all kinds of things, and people will politely give you some attention, or if you’re more fluent, give you a little more. Being in a foreign country is toughening, though. There’s no space for melodrama. And you get good at seeing the absurdity of life. Ask me sometime about the Taj Mahal in Tokyo. Sheesh.
I snapped this pic of Sapporo station on the very last leg of my Japan Railway runaround that took me from Kyushu up to Hokkaido (I wanted to do a diagonal of Japan). I am really into rail travel. I took the train to San Francisco from here a few years ago, just to do it. It took 28 hours each way. My brother was like, “Why don’t you just fly, dude?” And I was quiet. And knowing me, he goes, “Not as romantic, huh?”
The allure of travel. Yes. Romantic in theory. Can be very tiring in real life. Especially as you get older. The idea of a nice relaxing couple of hours at home is way more exciting than sleeping on the overnight train from Aomori to Sapporo, even if I did manage to make “friends” with a couple of Harvard students along the way, and some more “friends” while touring Sapporo Brewery. It was awesome to convene them all there in the hot summer evening at Oodori park beergarden, with all of our fresh beers and special Sapporo ramen bowls.
We were a collection of travelers not sure where we were going, still young enough to think that you could do everything, and waiting for the next adventure to carry us off to who knew where.
Looking up in the early morning light to see these lovely structural lines at Japan Railway’s Sapporo station really enthralled me. Maybe it was because I was hyperalert, wanting to make sure I didn’t miss the ONLY train that day that would take me back to Tokyo and Narita airport and the jet that would return me to these United States of America.
Where trains are slower and less reliable, but more romantic, too.
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