My friend Kim just got back from an extensive trip to Asia -- Hong Kong, Taipei, and a brief stop in Tokyo. Even before she left, I was filled with the urge to study Cantonese or Mandarin. Now that I've read her trip report, I'm all envious. I wanna go, too!
Tonal languages, how fascinating. I must know more. How do tone-deaf people manage?
Anyway, reading Kim's report I was reminded of the fact that I never publicized my travel journal from when I went to Japan in 2000. I really must do that sometime. I don't take pictures, I bring paper and a pen everywhere I go. In Japan, I carried around a nice little book all the time and filled it with notes on culture, where I went and what I saw, and in one case, a drawing of a beautiful temple in...um...er...it might have been Nara. Keeping a journal and carefully saving all my maps works really well, otherwise I wouldn't remember trips at all! I just relegate stuff quickly to secondary memory storage, I guess. Maps in particular make excellent memory-jogger tools for reconstructing the events of a trip. Plus they're so....flat. So handy. I love maps. I collect them. So tidy, so informative, so telling. Every new place I go, I get maps.
Anyways, I don't photograph well, IMO, and I really like how writing during my trips introduces me to people and gives me a chance to really capture the feeling behind a moment, not just its look. I'm not a good photographer, so if I want a really beautiful photo of a place, I just buy a postcard and get it over with. If you're at all interested in my trip journal from a visit to Utah, follow me.
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