Travel Essentials

I've had a few grumpy days lately - well, not all grumpy - but lacking the sort of 24-hour-a-day wideeyed wonder that I can usually sustain while travelling. This isn't that surprising I guess. I've now passed the limits of any vacation I've taken before, having been on the road for almost four weeks. (This isn't counting my time in Berlin and in NYC where I had an apartment - just living out of a suitcase travel). I'll have to learn the rhythms of travelling for a longer period, which probably include both more downtime each day, and also crafting a sense of purpose to my trip beyond just seeing the sights.

It's all making me think of travel essentials. First of all there are the basic necessities you need to carry with you. As you all know, travelling light is exactly what I am incapable of doing. But I'm hoping that these six months will teach me a lot about what is and isn't necessary and maybe I'll shed certain inessentials as I go. We are still talking about me here, and I like having a knitting project and book or two on hand, so I'll never be the true pilgrim pioneer, but doubtless there is a more streamlined way to be me and I'm looking forward to finding it.

Then there is the travel checklist, when things start to go minorly awry. This would be different for each person of course, but I have a little list of rules I remind myself of, which begins:

1. When you realise you are grumpy, sit down and eat something.
2. A shower is nearly as good as a night's sleep.
3. You can't see everything, so don't try.
4. Duck.

The last, of course, pertains particularly to me and particularly to Asia. I'm staying in a beautiful old wooden house in Kyoto right now and I am victim to its loveliness. For the umpteenth time just now I cracked my head into the solid wooden doorframe, raising quite the bump on my forehead...but then, having flipped through the guestbook I see I am not the only person who just can't learn that she is taller than her surroundings intended her to be! It's surprisingly easy to just drive yourself on and on, and get progressively more disgruntled and discontented. I suppose because we are so unused to having as much free time as one has when on vacation, it's tempting to create such a busy schedule that one hasn't got time to think about what one's doing at all.

But the whole point about this trip is to think carefully about what I'm doing, so that's the puzzle I'm working on now.

I've been thinking about essentials in a different way, too. Despite my declared intention to see the world with my child mind, glancing over these posts and even thinking about ideas for posts that I haven't got around to writing yet, I see how much I am reacting to preconceived notions - or more convolutedly, to my imagined idea of what people's preconceived notions of Japan are. Too many layers! Also, I keep thinking that I can try to "explain" Japan to people, to try and show what life is like here.

This is crazy for a bunch of reasons. First of all, I don't know what I'm talking about, and half the people reading this blog know a lot more about Japan than I ever will. Plus, the internet is full of Westerners writing about their experiences in Japan, and the basic rules of life in Japan like how to use an onsen, or what slippers to wear when, are all described over and over again. So I don't need to do it here.

I've been thinking a lot about essentialism, the colonialist's instinct to label, package, and as a result, limit and silence a conquered people. It's so funny to think about the many things that have been written about Japan, since people tend to be quite opinionated on the topic. It's amusing to read on one hand that, say, Japan lacks creativity and innovation, and then on the other hand to read the fawning awe the West has for Japanese craft and design. There are so many such contradictions, and in the end gross generalisations will always be refuted by individuals who will not be so contained.

In writing about Japan, I've been wanting to overthrow some of the preconceptions Westerners have received about Japanese people, but in the end whenever you try to describe you generalise and you leave things out. And I know so little to begin with. It's nearly impossible not to compare things, or to generalise from observations, and of course you are always working on a basis of your own experience. But I want to try and avoid sweeping statements and explanations altogether, and just put together tiny fragments of experiences here, some kind of word collage of all the wonderful things I am seeing, hearing, smelling, touching, tasting.

Enough musing - I'm going out to respire l'air de Kyoto...