It’s Sunday night and I have the mother of all Monday fears. It’ll be my first day back in the office tomorrow after taking three months off. Thanks to keeping this blog updated on my travels, my typing isn’t too bad but I think getting my coding back up to speed may prove to be more of an issue!
I’ve been meaning to sit down and attempt to kick-start my mind a little this weekend but I’ve been otherwise engaged with catch-up drinks, birthday celebrations, leaving parties and soaking up the early Festival atmosphere on the Royal Mile and Spiegeltent. It’s apparent that I have missed the brief respite granted to the denizens of Edinburgh that occurs after most of the students depart and before the tourists arrive en masse.
In between the aforementioned distractions I did manage to get my head around a lookaround-based regular expression that was bugging me before I went on my travels so the weekend wasn’t a complete write-off on the programming front.
So that’s that over and done with. I traveled westwards by train, plane and automobile for over 31,000 miles until I got back to where I started out from a few months ago. I beat Phileas Fogg by a few days. I’ve eaten subs, grinders and hoagies. I’ve renewed friendships and forged some new ones. I’ve experimented with facial hair, driven for the first time in a decade, jumped from a really high building, rolled down a steep hill in a ball, fell out of a perfectly fine airplane, shaved my head, met my baby niece and just about melted my credit card to boot.
Continue reading ‘There and back again’
I was quite pleased to leave Japan behind. Don’t get me wrong: I quite like it there but, after nigh-on three months of living out of a bag, I was ready to go home. I was also a little fed up with not understanding practically anything that was going on around me. Most places that I’ve traveled to before I spoke a little of the language or could at least make an educated guess at what signs were telling me. Being immersed in a kind of audio/visual white noise for a week was pretty disconcerting.
Continue reading ‘Tokyo – London – Edinburgh (6,622 miles)’
Now I’m back home I’m going to take a couple of weeks to get used to the idea of actually working again. I can kind of still type thanks to keeping this blog but coding may be something else entirely.
I’ll be using the time to visit relatives and catch up with friends before heading back to Edinburgh so blog posts will be far less frequent than of late. I’ll be back with my thoughts and reminiscings from the last few months soon though!
Let me get this straight. Blowing my nose or eating while walking is considered to be extremely rude but apparently you can cough up a huge gob of phlegm and spit without anyone batting an eyelid?
Welcome to Japan: land of contradictions. It was supposed to be the rainy season while I was here but I didn’t see a drop of rain all week. I also didn’t experience an earthquake which I’m delighted about.
Here you can still smoke in restaurants but signs try to dissuade you from smoking while you are walking down the street.
I learned that those masks you see people wearing aren’t due to worries over pollution. They’ve for combating the spread of germs. Specifically, your germs. You know, so if you’re ill you can still go into the office and not contaminate anybody else. Surely, any culture that has a specific word set aside for death from overwork can’t be all that healthy. On the other hand, in the longevity stakes, Australia (even with its new-found fattest nation status) is number two to Japan.
It does kind of make me wonder what age people would live to here if everybody did suddenly stop smoking.
