It's Oh So Much Nicer To Come Home

After a long (and I do mean long) train journey, I finally arrived back in Sendai last night at about 7 p.m., after almost three weeks of travel around southern Japan. It was a fantastically enlightening and enjoyable (if sweltering) trip, and I return feeling I have learned something new about the country I've now lived in for almost five years, particularly from the time I spent in Nagasaki, a city of fascinating cultural and historical depths whose fame ought not to rest solely on its status as the target of the second atomic bomb dropped at the end of World War II. Now that the trip is over, however, I find myself humming the refrain of the eponymous Sinatra tune. Nothing replenishes enthusiasm for sleeping in one's own bed like three weeks of, in T.S. Eliot's words, "restless nights in one-night cheap hotels". I will begin posting the photos to my Flickr account as soon as I have a chance to sort through them, and will perhaps write a few more in-depth posts about my experiences of the trip once I've had a chance to reflect on them. Stay tuned, if you are interested.