Over The Counter Culture

I’m hap-hap-happy to say that after a fantastic ~27 weeks away, the last of 11 flights brought me full circle back to Heathrow.

Needless to say a great deal has changed in the mean time, namely with the economy seeing some very dark days and the US undergoing regime change (or has it?).

It was a tumultuous time to be in some of these countries, too:

• Central and northern India in the grip of Islamist terror attacks that culminated in the horrifying slaughter of foreign nationals around the very spots of southern Mumbai that my friends and I had sat in just weeks before wearing the passports and speaking the language that would have got us selected and gunned down in the attack
• China in the aftermath of the hugely acclaimed Beijing Olympic Games, during National Golden Week that saw hundreds of millions of adoring and proud Chinese migrate to the capital to bask in the reflected glory and generally held optimism at China’s rising importance and respectability in the world – with just Tibet, a tainted milk scandal and a reasonably sharp regression to pre-Olympics press freedoms to sour the mood
• Japan as pressure was mounting on the latest prime minister to step down, as the world seemed to us to be gripped by Obamamania
• Thailand in the throes of political upheaval amidst a gigantic royal funerary procession for a long-dead relative of the royal family: a revered, almost godlike king thought to be on his deathbed; a judicial process that wiped out the ruling party and left the country rudderless for the few days leading up to our flight out; the main airport shut down by riotous, fascism-demanding PAD flashmobs;

By comparison, Australia, New Zealand and South America (Peru-Chile-Argentina-Brazil) all seemed to me to be rather docile!

The next few weeks will be interesting and particularly challenging for me, with work, accommodation and a general direction in life all on the “To Find” list…

You can now login to comment using your facebook details – just tick the appropriate box when posting. Comments appear in your facebook minifeed – I think! Maybe have a quick test?

<Cripes, what an old post – forgotten in the Drafts folder! going to push this out largely unfinished, time to move on to new things, new continents!>

It’s not all that often that a highly anticipated destination exceeds your expectations, then desentizes you to the point where you forget just how extreme and unique an experience you’re having. Granted, it’s been a while since I was home, so customary reference points are now just loose & shifting anchors; novelty and oddity are becoming the norm on this trip (thankfully!). What’s more, passing through Beijing and Shanghai immediately beforehand may have somewhat softened the full-on experience of urban, cutting-edge Asia.

Rather than go into detail, here are some vague observations:

- Seeing a suited businessman reading a violent / saccharine-cute / pornographic comic on the metro is much more likely than seeing him unfurl a Financial Times, Economist or local equivalent

- Fashion is all-important; but from all reports, Japanese society is remarkably cliquey, at all ages. Couples rarely form outside the confines of your social circle or without an introduction from someone in it. Fashion, I guess, isn’t used to attract partners in clubs or around town, but rather for self-expression or for cementing or improving one’s identity and standing in a clique. Or it might simply be a concession to what must be astoundingly heavy social pressures, in a society that from a very young age sees naval uniforms donned by schoolboys and incredibly short skirts struggling to leave schoolgirls with any pudeur [or protection from the many lewd gazes that about on Tokyo's admirably efficient public transport system!]

- Advertising is everywhere. I imagine individual adverts must have very low impact – to the tourist they’re baffling and blinding, but the locals must surely already be banner-blind, as insanity must be the logical conclusion of the endless attention demands of Tokyo oh-so-very needy flat surfaces

- Tokyo is a vertical town. Its “malls” line roads in two dimensions (along and up) in stark contrast to the more Western approach of 3D (along, in deep, and maybe up) retail and entertainment. As bar crawling tourists we really struggled to find watering holes – it’s frankly just odd and awkward to walk down a street with the bars as much as seven floors above your head, and the crawl becomes a search for drunken revellers streaming out of the ground floor elevator followed by a quick guess as to what floor they’ve come from. The rise is of course made in the optimism that the revellers have not just left because of last orders…

Verticality is just one example of why Tokyo seems to me to be a hard town to settle down in. Without a strong pre-existing network of comperes and insiders who already know which floor of which street to head to, browsing your way to a healthy social (and possibly professional) life really isn’t an option in Tokyo. The temp, the visitor – the unchaperoned newbie – is relegated to a purely passive role, that of observer. Good thing, then, that Tokyo offers so much to the eye <

Quick update – I’ve only just pushed the wrap-up of our tour to China to the blog (here) but since China we’ve spent 2 weeks in Japan, just under a fortnight in Bangkok and the northern rainforested and silver-sand-ed Thai island of Koh Chang, and are currently doing an extended visa run into Cambodia, via the Tomb Raider-featured temples of Angkor. We’re not in the region for long enough to get lost in this curious country or the rest of the region (Laos and Vietnam appeal, but will be left un-bothered by us), and we’ll be diving back into Thailand very soon.

Love to all, P