Cancelling an international flight is not as simple as you might think. The alimentary canal at departure time is designed to push things onto the plane, not off of it. We had already been cleared through customs, and since we were the last flight of the day, there was no “arrival” staff in place to receive us. Reverse peristalsis is never pretty.

After picking up luggage, we had to suffer the indignity of another long snaking queue to reconstruct our shattered flight plans. After another hour of moving nowhere and getting no information, I pulled the plug and went home.

I draw from this experience two and a half valuable lessons which, generously, I now will share.

Lesson 1. Don’t fly on Air France.
Lesson 2. Don’t fly on Air France on Bastille Day (see also Lesson 1).

I realize these two lessons overlap somewhat, but at this moment I feel the point is worth emphasizing. Also, my editor is after me to boost my content. As for the remaining half lesson, don’t use the iPhone version of WordPress. I wrote the first version of this on an iPhone and then lost it when I tried to post. That sort of day, I suppose.

Here endeth the whining. Over and out from Logan International Airport.

Soon after the piece was published on their site, I received a curious email from a woman named Anka who said a potential volunteer for her international organization bailed out, sending her, as justification, a copy of my piece. Anka continued:

If you do not want to be a stupid American doing stupids thing overseas, became a volunteer and encourage the people who read your article to became one. You, as an American, will do for once a good thing to the earth and do something good for yourself and kill the stupid ‘tourist’ you have inside.

For the record, I hereby encourage you to undertake enlightened travel and volunteer for a good cause.

Why didn’t I just lighten up? Eventually I did; I almost always do. After a day or so, there I was, swaying to salsa music and hoisting margaritas like all the other turistas. But that first day is always a bitch.

Why travel? Where you’re going, chances are you don’t speak the language, don’t know the customs, the inside jokes, the good restaurants. You won’t know if you’re regularly being fleeced in business transactions. Fiddling with small change in stores will make you feel like a five year old.

Why travel? Chronically happy people easily provide the correct answer: BECAUSE of all those things. You’ll learn so much: think of how much fun you’ll have sorting out which restaurants are merely bad from those which are a genuine threat to your health. I don’t deny that this is the right answer. But the initial cranky period interests me. From the perspective of the first day, let me crank up the cranky knob and provide

TEN REASONS TO DISLIKE TRAVEL.

1. First of all, while you’re away, someone is robbing your house and mistreating your cat. Duh.

2. You can’t speak the language, so everything is awkward, embarrassing, and infuriatingly slow. Or let’s suppose you can speak the language a little. You still feel bad, because

2b. You can’t speak the language well at all (only awkwardly and with that awful American twang), or

2c. You can’t speak the language fluently with perfect use of local idioms, so you’d rather not even pretend, because it’ll just come out sounding awful.

In any event, now they have to speak English with you, and God knows they hate that.

3. You are little more than a wallet. All else is puffery on your part and flattery on theirs. Anyone who depends on tourists bitterly resents them. Why should they have to do a little dance for you just to punch their meal ticket? Honestly, how would YOU like to wear lederhosen and play a tuba every day? You’d be pissed too, tips or not. People in the tourism business vary only in their ability to mask the creeping homicidal mania to which they all eventually succumb.

4. No matter how you choose your itinerary, you will miss the really good stuff. If you plan carefully and obsessively, you won’t be able to improvise and so you’ll miss the proverbial forest for the trees. But if you don’t plan carefully, you’ll waste most of your time standing in lines or sitting in cafes trying to figure out what to do.

5. Americans are bad people, disliked the world over. This is bad news no matter where you go. Your best bet is to try to act invisible and apologize a lot using (without even realizing it) a lame unplaceable quasi-European accent. Please please please don’t put a Canadian flag on your luggage: Stand up and take your well-deserved abuse like a man. The only consolation here is that the Germans are almost as loathsome as you are.

Other tourists, particularly Japanese, are good for making fun of. Try it and see how much it does to assuage your downtrodden self-esteem. See how those Japanese just want to take pictures and then leave! Ha ha! But you know how to do it right, yes sir. No one would ever laugh out loud watching you. Note: this technique is not likely to make you feel any better if the other tourists are Americans, or God forbid, in your party, or God really forbid, your family.

6. Tipping is an activity expressly designed to make you crazy. There is a suave process and correct amount to tip the monkeys who assist you throughout your trip, but you are clueless. James Bond can do it, but you? Give me a break! If you give too much, they will smirk because you are a cash-fat dope, a naive mark begging to be stripped of available funds. If you give too little, they will smirk, and you just know that they’ll be talking about you with their little monkey buddies. Even if you manage to guess the right amount, you still get the smirk if you are awkward and stiff in your delivery. That little smirk is a pain worse than a severe hickey.

7. Your whole trip is one big cliche from beginning to end. I know you planned it carefully and bought the expensive but tasteful Dorling Kindersley Travel Guides. But won’t you feel like a dope when you realize all the other tourists in that darling “undiscovered” restaurant are referring to the exact same page of the exact same guidebook so they can see what to order for dessert? You are just like every other goddamned tourist on the planet, no matter how superior you feel to those poor Japanese, except since you are American, you are actually worse. Just because. Now go to the back of the line.

8. It is possible to die from embarrassment, and you just don’t need to run the risk. Embarrassment sickness is much like altitude sickness. You need to build up tolerance to it slowly, or the shock to your system can be fatal.

9. You can’t win. If your destination sucks, then why bother going? On the other hand, if everything is better there, then you must be some kind of idiot not to live there.

10. Nobody else worries about all this shit as much as you do, and frankly we’re all getting tired of hearing you go on about it. Would you please just shut up and enjoy the show?

Beware of these warning signs during the first day or so of your trip. Give it some time and the pain will probably pass. Strip off your ingrained habit-crust and run around naked for a few days. Try on a little simple dignity. It’ll do you a world of good.

This week we present for your sophisticated twenty-first century reading pleasure a very brief poem by twentieth-century poet Joanne Kyger and some excerpts from a twentieth-century expedition to Japan undertaken by our own Paracelsus.

SUDDENLY! by Joanne Kyger SUDDENLY! The same Moon in the next century!

An Alchemist Abroad: Paracelsus in Japan

My friend Mike lived in Osaka and I needed to visit him before he returned to the States. I convinced my friend Brian to travel with me to Japan, and these are some of my journal entries from that trip.

9 August - Thursday

Fly into Japan; because of the International Dateline we do not arrive until the next day. Generally when you fly east to west you are chasing the sun, and so the flight seems very short, local time to local time. But in this case we are crossing the date line (flying from east to west, or from West to the East, depending on how you look at it), which resets the clock 24 hours later. So it is a very long flight, local time to local time. Our flight is over three hours late taking off, partially because of some obscure hydraulic problem with the nose gear, but also partially because the chief stewardess accidentally blew open the emergency inflatable slide while trying to open the side door to get a little air on to the stifling plane. Because of time-on-duty laws our flight crew has to be replaced with a fresh one (since the flight was so late), but before the old crew leaves one of the attendants gives me and Brian two bottles of wine and another gives us a third. We are flying well before takeoff.

13 August - Monday
Went to: Shirahama
Did: Shirahama beach and a local sento
Lunch: curry rice
Dinner: Mike's place, Domino's Pizza delivers...
Slept in: Osaka

We wake up early for the train to Shirahama, but a million other people have also gotten up early and decided to ride in our car. Many of them are interested in standing on my feet. The whole train is SRO for the two hours it takes to get there. We arrive at Shirahama before noon, but not before a tremendous thunderstorm which threatens to wash away us, the train station, and many of the nearby shops. Preferring to sit out the storm, we stay inside and eat a breakfast of hato keku (hot cakes) before setting off for the beach.

Once at the beach, we do what all people do at the beach: we lay in the sun, swim, and build a big sandcastle. And though the sun really never comes out (it does manage to give me and Mike a nasty sunburn), the swimming is fine, and the sandcastle is a good one. We walk away from the beach for a few hours, and when we come back, we see that our sandcastle has been stomped flat.

This is no big deal in itself, but curiously we see that there are two or three small replicas of our castle nearby. We try very hard not to draw conclusions about psychology and culture. I am surprised by the fact that the beach is incredibly trashed, a pattern which we were to see repeated all over Japan. The subways are immaculate, the railway stations spotless, but the hiking trails, beaches and lakes are covered with litter of every kind. Go figure.

14 August - Tuesday
Went to: Nara
Did: Todaiji Temple, Nigatsu Hall, local festival in Nara
Lunch: Mister Donuts in Nara
Dinner: Sugayo's place, sukiyaki and beer
Slept in: Mike's place

The morning is very slow and extremely lazy. We discuss many things, including plans for the next few days. Finally, we head off for Nara, where we visit Todaiji (Great Eastern Temple) and the enormous Daibutsu (Giant Buddha) inside. It is a truly awesome building, gigantic, entirely of wood. One of the more surprising things about the temple is the fact that inside the compound itself they have a little shop which sells religious objects, talismans, and Buddhas.

But not just the classic inscrutable Buddha statue … they also sell cute cartoony ceramic Baby Buddhas, cute bouncy bobbing-head Baby Buddhas, and grinning Baby Buddha ashtrays where you shove your smoldering cigarette through the gap tooth in the Buddha’s dopey grin. Obviously I have some cultural baggage which prevents me from understanding how this all fits together. Go figure. Mike tells me that a friend of his who grew up in Nara says this is not so weird, because the Japanese view this particular Buddha as almost a comical figure because of its enormous size and its Mona Lisa style grin.

Dinner that night is at Mike’s girlfriend’s manchon (mansion) which is the word they really use to describe these tiny apartments with one bedroom, one bathroom, and an LDK, or living room-dining room-kitchen. The floor is tatami and the dinner, sukiyaki, is as delicious as the room is small. And the room is quite small indeed.

22 August - Wednesday
Went to: Kyoto
Did: Ginkakuji (The Silver Pavilion)
Lunch: Chinese restaurant near Tennoji
Dinner: Greasy place in Kyoto, pork cutlet on rice
Slept in: Gesshin-in, part of Kodaiji Zen Temple

Upon reaching Kyoto, we take the bus up to Ginkakuji (Silver Square Temple) which is at the top of the famous Philosopher’s walk. We manage to take in two more temples before we need to get to the Gesshin-in so we can check in and lay down our bags.

The Gesshin-in is attached to the Kodaiji Zen Temple and takes lodgers. The place is hard for us to find, as all of our maps are inadequate. As far as I can tell, almost all maps for tourists here, whether American or Japanese, are cartoony, stylized, and littered with idiotic cutesy cartoon figures, making it very hard to figure out the scale or navigate in general, as many of the smaller streets are left off (or obscured by some grinning teddy bear). We finally find the place and peek inside. The “garage” area is filled with motor scooters and small (I mean tiny) motorcycles, probably ten to fifteen in all. Zen and the Art of Miniature Motorcycle Maintenance. A little monk comes out who speaks some English and explains that this is his hobby. He is a bald albino and very hyperactive, which gives him a curious appearance and manner. He speaks very rapidly and quickly shows me two photos of himself: in one he is dressed in his Buddhist robes, and in the other he has on a Mickey Mouse shirt and wool hat, and he is riding a ridiculously small (clown-sized) bicycle. He absolutely loves tiny bikes and motorcycles. The show isn’t over yet, though, and he pulls out a small photo album which has pictures of him astride various tiny bikes, scooters, and assorted stuffed animals. The common denominator is him straddling something or other in photo after photo.

At any rate, we have two futons rolled out for us on the tatami, and just outside the sliding screen door from our room is a beautiful Zen garden, complete with pond, carp, and shrine. In short, it is exactly what I was hoping it would be like. Soon after our conversation with the monk, we set off for the downtown sights of Kyoto and a little dinner.

Later that night, I try to sit outside on the wooden deck overlooking the temple garden in peaceful contemplation for a while. Across the pond from me, two dim candles are flickering in the tiny garden shrine. The weather is sticky and the bugs are thick, and in short order the mosquitoes have gotten the better of me and my search for enlightenment, and I go inside and hit the sack.

The next morning, we eat breakfast in the temple (it was part of the lodging deal) and our friend the monk, who is wearing Donald Duck shorts this morning, demonstrates some of his miniature motorcycles and bicycles for us. While we’re getting ready to leave, he is busy putting on his priestly garments for the morning services just down the road. We ask him if we can see the service, but this doesn’t get understood clearly, and as near as we can tell, it would be inappropriate for us to tag along.

He wants very badly to know if I will be back that evening to chat. No? Then maybe next week? Finally, when I tell him I may visit Japan some time in the future, he insists that I come by for a visit. He is extremely friendly with me, and Brian thinks he is maybe a bit too friendly. Just before he leaves for the morning services, I get Brian to snap a picture of the two of us, a picture which for mysterious reasons, never appears on film. Go figure.

24 August - Friday
Went to: Hiroshima
Did: Peace Memorial Museum
Lunch: Japanese place in Himeji with Jenny, udon
Dinner: at the Minshuku, tempura, sashimi, miso etc.

Today we meet with Brian’s friend from the US, Jenny. After some missed connections and confusion at the Himeji train station, and a little lunch in Himeji, we are off to Hiroshima. In no time at all, we are pulling into Hiroshima, and we hop on a streetcar to take us to our minshuku. We know that the streetcar’s route will take us past the top of the Peace Park and the demolished A-Bomb dome building, but we are talking about one thing and then another before I finally ask how close we are to the dome. Brian points right behind me and says “Look, there it is.” And sure enough, there it is. Snapping out of some random conversation and looking around to see that building is genuinely chilling. The whole idea of a pilgrimage to see this city, to gawk at this city, not because of what some Buddhist or Shogun did in 1270, but because of what we did to it in 1945 is also somewhat chilling. It feels obscene in some sense to come and look around and take pictures and say “Gosh, so this is where it happened.” But at the same time it feels very important. There is a guilty temptation to think that the Japanese people around us look at us (or me, since I am the only Caucasian of our group of three) with feelings of blame or disgust, but a larger part of me assures myself that this is certainly not the case.

For them, or most of them in any case, this is just another day in the city where they live, and we are just a few more tourists in town to see the sights. It even occurs to me that they might well be sick and tired of the sullen, guilt-ridden gaijin who troop through their town, mope about for a day or so, avoiding eye contact, and then, breathing a sigh of relief, hop the next train for happier climes. Certainly there is a lot to think about in this town.

After checking into the minshuku, we go straight to the Peace Museum. It is a very sobering visit to say the least. It is also interesting to be there with Brian and Jenny who are both Japanese-Americans whose parents were detained in the U.S. during the war. As we walk through the museum, the exhibits and pictures become more and more graphic, until I can no longer read them all carefully before moving on with a churning stomach. Brian and I also take time to see an English language film on the bomb.

I am struggling with a variety of emotions and sensations at this point (not to mention some nausea), but I definitely feel that this museum, and more specifically the movie that we see, have taken the bombing out of the larger context of the great conflagration of world war. There is no mention of the fire-bombing of other cities, either in Japan or Germany, nor is there any effort to describe the crossroads that the war had reached in Japan at the time of the bombing. The movie pulled on heartstrings more overtly than necessary in my opinion (“There were children playing in Hiroshima that morning [sound of carefree laughter] … birds were singing [whistle whistle etc.] …”). After we leave the museum, we head up to the A-Bomb dome, passing along the way piles of origami cranes. One pile, beneath a statue of a little girl who died of leukemia while folding a thousand cranes, contains what must be tens of millions of cranes laid in strings of a thousand all around the base of the statue.

27 August - Sunday - The flight home
Went to: San Francisco, then home
Did: that flying thing
Lunch: Mister Donuts, courtesy of Mike
Dinner: United Airlines' Tiny Portions Restaurant

In the morning we talk to Mike some more. He goes into work pretty late, so he walks around with us as we try to do some last minute shopping before we hit the skyway. We eat a sort of brunch at Mister Donuts, for which he insists on paying, and then we say our thank-yous and goodbyes to Mike, and off he goes.

To keep the trip exciting and suspenseful to the very end, we are very nearly late for our plane home. After our farewell to Mike, we head back to Mike’s house to collect our stuff so we can leave for the airport. By the time we reach the shuttle bus stop near Mike’s, we realize that if the bus is on time, we will only have 30 minutes at the airport before takeoff. Including waiting in customs lines, showing passports, etc. But of course the bus is on time, and it arrives at the airport at the advertised hour, although we do pass a few nervous minutes as the bus wades through the congested elevated highways.

Whereas our plane leaving the U.S. from San Francisco took off well over three hours late, we pull away from the gate in Osaka exactly as the second hand flicks past the appointed time. In Japan, even United Airlines is on time. But it shouldn’t have come as a surprise. I cannot think of a single train, bus, or streetcar during my whole stay that was not on time. This certainly includes the ones that pulled away from us, doors closing, the conductor looking straight at us but not acknowledging our existence as we sprinted to catch up, begging him to stop. The trains really do run on time: it’s not just a good idea here; it’s the way things work.

One of the last things we see as the plane spins off over the Pacific is the top of the dark cone of Fuji-san just poking out over a thick blanket of clouds. The captain points it out, and as people crowd around the tiny windows for a last glimpse of Japan, I can just see it: it does not look gigantic and foreboding from here. It looks small and distant, almost diminutive, and it is quickly leaving us behind as it shoulders its way through the clouds.

We were one sunrise away from watching the reddish glow of the evening sun color the rim of the Grand Canyon, and one sunset away from the first light of daybreak over Zabriske Point, in Death Valley. We were smack dab in the middle of Nowhere, Nevada.

Not to say there isn’t much of anything in Nowhere. Au contraire. George had been enlightening me to the wonder of the alluvial plains that exist here in Nevada. With no rain to wash it all away, all the material that sheds from the tops of the mountains here falls to the bottoms. And stays there. It creates a nice, gradual, slope of residue, once seen (and identified), never forgotten. In fact, on the way out of Death Valley the next day, we were basically driving straight up the alluvial slope for 45 minutes, avoiding tarantulas that darted across the road. But that’s another story.

No, here in the middle of Nowhere there was two-lane blacktop, lots of sand, and some scrubby desert vegetation. (and probably Wile E. Coyote, although he was much too wily to be seen. Unlike Wile E. Tarantula — again, another story.) And Sky. Big Sky. Sky that made Montana jealous. Big, dramatic, desert but-it’s-lookin’-like-rain, and not wimpy pacific northwest micro-rain, but slam it down, cats and dogs, southern summer thunderstorm rain.

A Sky that was so dramatic that George pulls over and comments, “Man, will you just look at that Sky.” Which is one of the things that makes George a good travelling companion — he’ll stop and smell the sagebrush. We hop out and stand agog at the beautiful sunlight spreading through the high dark cumulus. Menacing, yet beautiful. Alone, we appreciate.

An unnatural sound clatters through our meditative silence as a lone Coca-Cola can rolls down the highway. We stand even more amazed, because we’re in the middle of nowhere, almost back to nature, soaking up the desert landscape, the gorgeous almost-sunset and are jolted back to reality by a singular token of civilization, intruding on the road-runner-esque landscape. Our heads both swivel comically to the right, as the can, seemingly out of nowhere, rolls down the double yellow line in the middle of the blacktop. It almost feels like we’re in some weird commercial, but lacking the requisite camera crew and pretty graphics.

Then an even more unnatural sound blasts us both from our left as an 18-wheeler thunders unexpectedly around the bend and thrusts itself into our view before our startled inhales are completed. Its mammoth wheels roll over the can, crush it, suck it up and around, crush it again and fling it out behind, a crumpled, flattened token of what was once the perfect shape, the wheel, the cylinder, the rolling reminder of civilization… now just a flat piece of aluminum on a lonely Nevada highway.

As fast as it came, the juggernaut is gone. We both stare dumbly in stunned amazement at the coincidence of us, the can, and the rig. A collective “Whoa” settles among us.

“Let’s roll”, sez George. I couldn’t agree more.

I found the place names in Mexico almost as arresting as the visual splendor: Xochimilco, Ixtaccihuatl, Teotihuacan. Some of these names defy pronunciation by the typical gringo (such as myself), but if you keep at it and tame the sounds, you are rewarded with gemstones on the tip of your tongue. Once you’ve captured the volcano name Popocatepetl, once you can conjure it up at will, you can practically see the steam belching from its dark conic peak. Cuauhtemoc, Kwau-TE-mok, was a warrior, and if you see his likeness and hear his name properly pronounced, that stressed second syllable falling forcefully against the front teeth, Kwau-TE-mok, you can sense the repect he commanded (it’s no accident the current mayor of Mexico City has the given name Cuauhtemoc).

Whereas the Coffee Czar amused us in the van by carving tiny animals out of soapstone and scrap wood, I entertained my fellow travelers by reading all the place names aloud as often as possible. I’m told it can be annoying, but it had the curious effect of magnifying my there-ness. Even now I can cook up a little Mexican there-ness by pushing my finger across the atlas pages and reading aloud: Coahuila, Tamaulipas, Tlaxcala, Iztapalapa, and Iztacalco. To my mind, the conquering Spaniard’s names (San Miguel, San Luis, Santa Ana, repeat…) don’t have nearly the same staying power as the solid Indian names. Fortunately for Mexico, the old place names survived more often than they were lost. Good place names reek of earthy there-ness, and Mexico is blessed with an abundance of good place names. And I don’t know anybody who doesn’t need a good dose of there-ness every now and again.

Reversals of fortune in placenames and prose figure prominently in our contribution this week. It may seem a matter of no great importance, but zaP spelled backwards is Paz, which is the Spanish word for peace. In this season of darkness becoming lightness at long last, may peace, and an abiding sense of here-ness, be with you all.