...it's an interesting planning experience.

The planning part of a trip doesn't usually get included in my travel blog. But when I went to France, there wasn't a lot of planning involved...in fact, there was very little planning involved because I leeched off of the others in my group and went with them to Cinque Terre and Rome. And Austria wasn't such a huge planning push because we had like four months to figure out what to do with one full week and then four extra weekends. Or was it five? It's been a while. But anyway, this Japan thing kind of just happened. We bought the tickets in May. We're leaving in May. I also finished classes, graduated, and moved out in May. Another big difference: five weeks of whatever we want to do. No class schedule to work around. No knowledge of six-hour train rides back from Venice thinking "I should be reading The Roman Spring of Mrs. Stone right now."* Just me and my brother and five weeks in a country made of volcanic rock.

And that's the thing about planning a trip to Japan. I know that Japan is made out of volcanic rock because I read it three or four days ago. When I bought the tickets to Japan, I didn't know how much I didn't know. Blame it on a Euro-centric history curriculum or lack of exposure--I don't even know how to pronounce most of the cities I've been told we should see.

But as of half-an-hour ago, we're 90% settled. We know where we're going and where we're staying and we have the guidebook ready. Actually, I need to flag the cities we're going to in the book. And charge my camera battery. If you're curious, we're Rough Guiding it this time, mostly because they offered the most recent edition at a better price than the others. I was hoping we could secure a copy of Let's Go to Japan before we left but that doesn't seem to be playing out. Oh well. What do those Harvard kids know about Japan anyway?

So how did we plan five weeks in the land of sushi? I asked Daniel (the little brother) to write down the names of the cities he wanted to see, then figured out what the best way to see them was. Circular is usually my game, and circular is what we're doing this time, more or less, since we're flying in and out of Tokyo. Mostly I just read the old entries in the Guster road journal, because that's what I do when I have other, more important things to do. It's a really good read, if you're ever trying to do some serious procrastinating. You can challenge yourself by setting date-related goals (e.g. I will read all the entries up to 2003 before I go to bed).

And that's kind of it. I need to buy a rain coat, since we're going to Japan during rainy season. I need to find my travel toothpaste. I need to figure out my soap situation. And other than that, I'm just waiting for Tuesday morning, which will be an abnormally short day, because by the time we land (fourteen hours later) it will be Wednesday afternoon in Tokyo. On the plus side, we leave Japan at 3:30pm and arrive in Atlanta at 3:10pm in the same afternoon. If they didn't freak me out so much, I'd love time zones. They're like magic.



*You shouldn't. Read it, I mean. It wasn't very good. The class I read it for was probably the best literature class I've ever taken, though.