It’s December and for me that means it is “blog every day month” an effort for which I have long since concocted a list of blog-able reflective topics called my December-ish posts each of which should do little more than offer a leaping off point for some rambling writing to fill up my daily blogging quota.

Today that topic is…

Did you travel in 2025?

In 1998 I went to Europe for the first time.  Until that moment of stepping off the plane and riding the train into London’s Victoria Station with my giant backpack over my shoulder, Europe was an abstraction in my head. It was this place I had heard about over and over and over but seemed more like a story that I could read about than I real place I could visit.

Since then I’ve been back to Europe multiple times, travelled through a list of European countries so long I struggle to remember exactly when and where I’ve gone there, and have long since settled Europe itself in my head as just another option for an interesting (if expensive) vacation.

And. Until a couple months ago my thoughts about Asia were pretty much in line with how I thought about Europe in the 1990s. That is to say, I have friends from all over Asia, I have seen it in media and read about it in books, I had been studying the Japanese language, and I’ve certainly eaten the food of nearly every Asian immigrant group who serves it in Canada… but the place itself was almost an abstract concept in my head that I couldn’t quite wrap my mind around.

Earlier this year were contemplating our annual travel options and one of us suggested Japan.

If you are even so much as a sporadic reader of this blog that should be no surprise to you. We ended up spending nearly three weeks on the little island in November of this year after all, and I still haven’t caught up with my recap posts about it (blame this blog every day thing, I guess!) 

This abstraction that I am talking about is not a lack of perception. I think the world is kinda chunked up into sections of people and culture that until you spend a day wandering through their streets or trying to buy lunch from a local or sitting in a hut on the side of a mountain listening to a story or lace up you shoes and run a five klick race through one of their parks… many places on this globe can be little more than an idea in your head that is hard to get a sense of what it would be like to spend time there. What does the air smell like? What are the sounds? Is it big or small, dense or wide open? A thousand questions of the moments and how it all might become real. So much of what we see from those places is framed as news or art or otherwise showing us the shiny bits that are worth sharing. None of it is any more than a story. It is not until you arrive there that it all gels into something more.

For example. If you had never visited my city or even come here to Canada it would be really difficult to describe to you what my day-to-day was like, say, even yesterday. We woke up and it was twenty five degrees below zero with yet another thin layer of snow… that I had to go out and shovel. I was squinting in the sunlight and bundled up in four layers to clean the sidewalk all so that we could hop in the car and drive down a highway over drifting snow and patches of ice to go for lunch with my mother-in-law for her birthday. The air hurts. The place is dirty with spatters of muddy snow all over everyones cars. We live in the suburbs and all there is around is the sound of engine noises echoing over the snow and the sky is filled with the chimney exhaust of everyone’s furnace running twenty-three and a half hours a day.  In other words… it is absolutely nothing like the vibe you’d find on the tourism sites if you searched for us. Nothing like the story we project out to the world for people who can’t or don’t come here to know about us.

And I think that was like me and Asia. I had a story in my head but I knew it wasn’t actually real. Until we walked through the streets of Japan, until I went out and did a community run event, until we bumbled through the subway trying to find our way, until we were hungry and needed a quick lunch between touristy explorations… until all of that and a thousand other little things… all of it was a bit of an abstraction to me.

But we’ve been to Japan now and Asia as a whole just seems that much more real in my head now… almost like I should book another trip soon.