Author: Eric Farber

Innocents Abroad in Japan, Part 1

“So if you’ve got no job and runnin’ out of dough
And they moved the factory down to Mexico
Just pack your bags and don’t forget your Kimono
And you can follow me, honey, all the way to Yokohama”

From “Move to Japan” by The Band 1993

Do you remember the late 1980s with America’s manufacturing sector at a crossroads and Japan’s rising mightily? “How do the Japanese do it?” was the question of the day. Studies were done; books written. My memory of it all is pretty vague, but I do recall the so-called “Japanese miracle.” And now I’ve learned that before it, there were other periods of extraordinary Japanese growth and accomplishment.

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Innocents Abroad in Japan, Part 2

“War is the work of man.

War is the destruction of human life.

War is death.

To remember the past is to commit oneself to the future.

To remember Hiroshima is to abhor nuclear war.

To remember Hiroshima is to commit oneself to peace.”

His Holiness Pope John Paul II on February 25, 1981

Traveling from Hakone to Hiroshima, we had to change trains at Shin-Osaka. As our second train sat on the platform with its door open, I made the mistake of starting to board too early. Smiling Japanese passengers called me back. We had to wait for a cleaning team to go through the cars before we could take our seats. We’d never seen a team of train-car cleaners work before. All were dressed in white jumpsuits. One woman carried a battery-operated vacuum cleaner. Like nearly everyone else we observed in Japan, they worked quickly and efficiently

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Innocents Abroad in Japan, Part 3

“Wearing kimono and walking in Kyoto”

Sign for a kimono rental service

From the window of a speeding Shinkansen on a sunny day, the impressions pile up quickly. There nearly always seem to be mountains in the distance. In the foreground, every bit of land seems precious. All the arable fields are under cultivation, and in settlements, the two-and-three-storey residential buildings are grouped so close together that it seems it would be difficult to drive a car among them. As for passenger cars in Japan, many are smaller and boxier that the larger, aerodynamic styling we associate with the Toyotas and Nissans in North America.

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Discoveries in Uzbekistan

It is after 7 a.m. in Tashkent where I had arrived with others only four hours before in the middle of the night. I go into the hotel’s currency exchange office and lay a hundred-dollar bill on the counter. The woman in charge goes to a cabinet in the rear of the room and returns with a brick-size bundle of local currency. There are eight packets of one thousand Uzbek som notes, one hundred notes to a packet. With eight thousand som to the dollar, I now have eight hundred thousand som, which, other than for a few major purchases, will see me through the next eight days. “Salem Alaykom.” Welcome to Uzbekistan!

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Gdansk and Around

Kay and I passed through Gdansk for the first time about ten years ago on our way north through the Baltic States in an attempt to beat the summer heat further south. On that occasion, we stayed only a couple days to admire the old city and ogle the amber jewelry in the shop windows.

This visit was more comprehensive. During scheduled excursions from our annual two-week literary conference held at a nearby resort on the Baltic Sea, we revisited the beautiful old town’s center, overflowing with summer tourists, and spent some choice hours in two museums that hadn’t existed at the time of our first visit.

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Copenhagen

Finally! It was time for Kay and me to feel what it was like to spend a few days in what some claim is the most livable and happiest city on the planet. July was a perfect time to fly north and escape Istanbul’s summer heat and humidity.

As we debarked into Copenhagen’s airport, I was all eyes and ears. Do the happiest people in the world look outwardly different from the rest of us? Maybe not. But maybe courtesy and thoughtfulness are signature traits of happy people. We certainly found these on display at the counter of the airport tourist office where we bought our five-day Copenhagen cards that gave us passes on all public transportation and admission to every museum we visited. And we found them again when we checked into the central city’s Absalon Hotel. Preliminaries accomplished, the receptionist left her post to personally escort us to our room, making sure we knew how to use our key cards to run the elevator.

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A Short Trip to Kosovo and Macedonia 2017

Here in Istanbul, after an unseasonable cool, wet spring, we have been immediately plunged into summer.

Other news chez Farber is that I’ve been suffering with pain in my lower back from the sciatic nerve in my left leg. Years ago I had these problems but thought I had overcome them. Naturally, when they recurred recently, I ascribed them to a ruptured disc, as had been the case in the past. Now, I’m not so sure. I had an MRI two days ago and will discuss the results with a doctor soon.

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We’d Like to Do It Over

Holy cow! Do a trip over from scratch? Why? Because on our recent trip to Hamburg, Germany Kay and I experienced every international traveler’s nightmare. We lost our passports. Not lost exactly; they were stolen along with Kay’s Turkish residence permit and everything else in her purse – cell phone, credit cards, house keys, money – everything, including the purse! Things could have been worse. Kay wasn’t mugged, and the passports were dropped off at a police station but not before we had applied for replacements, which automatically cancelled the stolen ones. Her residence permit was returned, too; a blessing because it couldn’t be replaced outside of Turkey, meaning that she might not have been able to come home.

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