<is back>

<iz ded>

At some point — when my brain has congealed once more out of its current liquified state — I will post not only about my trip to Japan (which will likely take several posts) but about bilingualism and the difficulties thereof. Because I am freaking exhausted, y’all, and only part of it is the jet lag; a much larger part is the effort of spending twelve days attempting to function in a language for which I have only marginal speaking/listening ability and even less reading.

(A lot of you probably have the same impulse I do, which is to read any text put in front of you, because it’s there. You wind up wishing you could turn that damned impulse off when the text is in scribbles the average local five-year-old could read more quickly than you. But you can’t. Or at least I couldn’t.)

Short form: Japan was indeed, to borrow a phrase, “oh-kamis-why-is-it-so-humid-melty-death-hot,” but also awesome. I got to revisit a few places from my 2002 trip, and see a lot more new places, and there will, of course, be pictures. Major, major thanks go to starlady38 and kurayami_hime, who served as our interpreters and guides, which I think is the only reason my brain didn’t go into full-bore shutdown from language fatigue; both of them are hella more fluent than I am, and also guided me and kniedzw to an abundance of sights and experiences (the light-up at Kiyomizu-dera! Punk kaiseki! Beach party! Takarazuka!) that we would not have found our way to alone. We are grateful little ducklings.

And now to finish getting crap out of the way, so I can go to bed when this current spate of energy runs out.