works of wanderlust

November has ended, and on the last weekend of the month I time travelled across sixteen timezones, arriving back home before I left Tokyo. Weird, huh? Our flight left Narita airport at 18:30 on Saturday evening and we arrived in Edmonton at 16:20 the same day.

International travel can mess with your mind… and your circadian rhythms. It took me most of Sunday to glom back onto Mountain Standard, and then just when I thought I was doing fine I tossed and turned until 3am. Ah, jet lag, you nasty witch.

All that is to say, our near-three week vacation in Japan is done.

I have many thoughts, and (a) there is no possible way, still slightly jet lagged, to get them all into even a couple blog posts, and (b) I do want to break the surface tension of that reluctance and my lack of posting here for that duration and write something.

We landed in Tokyo nearly three weeks ago. Phew! Has it been that long already? I was equally jet lagged as I am now, but going in the opposite direction. Sixteen timezones is no joke. But, we got out on foot (and train) and explored the city for five whole days.

And you can see a lot of even a massive city like Tokyo in five days. I mean, you can’t even see enough of it or even a significant portion of it, but you can see a lot. And a city like Tokyo throw a lot at you.

We stayed about six blocks from Shibuya Station, which if you know nothing else about Tokyo you might know it for that crazy scramble crosswalk where millions of tourists flock to simply cross a major intersection in a bustle of people.

We did the stereotypical thing and filmed ourselves crossing it. And I think the locals hate that in their beautiful bustling and glowing city what people get kinked about is crossing an intersection whilst making a selfie. I did not selfie.

The thing I noted most strongly about Tokyo is that it seems a lot like a lot of cities that have been mashed together into one super city. We would catch the the train, ride fifteen minutes through three or four or eight stops and then get off, only to emerge from the chaos of the rail system into a brand new place. You’d pop up by the Imperial Palace one day and stroll by some lovely gardens surrounded by a serious business district. Then we’d take the train a few stops and suddenly I’m in Akihabara and I feel like I just popped into a video game level, or another stop and boom: temple, or yes another stop and wham: fish market.

We ascended two towers whilst we were in Tokyo: the Metropolitan Government Observatory (pictured) and walked around inside there for about an hour just looking at the endless city, and then later The Tokyo Sky Observatory, at night, and seeing endless lights stretching to the horizon made us realize that we were in a sea of millions of people and millions of stories, and there was no way we could ever see even a fraction of part of it all.

Of course it is really the culture shock of Tokyo that caught me off guard. I feel like I try to be open minded enough that nothing truly shocks me. I am a trained scientist after all, observing the world with a rational mind of curious interest. And maybe it is only that as foreign as you expect a place to feel, it usually turns out to be foreign in ways you didn’t expect. That is to say, a lot of things feel mundanely familiar if only because we live in a great big interconnected global village and a lot of the world has been homogenized into a grey paste of sameness. But then the other bits that you didn’t expect rise up above the sameness of bank machines and traffic lights and potato chips and homelessness and starbucks and those differences are so stark against that grey backdrop that they are all the more surprising because of it.

We went to temples and museums and markets and seven-elevens and ramen shops and kabuki theatre shows that brought us new experiences in Tokyo that will stick in my head for decades.

And yet, here we are back home again.

It had snowed a day before we arrived back in Edmonton. It was cold and grey, but grey in a freshly arrived winter sort of way. And lots of people were happy to see us back, asking about our adventures and to regale them with stories of what we’d seen.

So much, I’d tell them. Where to start?

I think it will need to dribble out as I remember it, little bits of it will poke up into future reflections or recollections as I write and remember in the coming months. And that is a good kind of travel experience, I think, the kind that worms into your brain and fills it with so much that you can’t possibly explain to anyone in any coherent way what it all meant.