Four Days, Three Continents

 

In June and July of 2008, I had a bit of a scheduling pileup. My girlfriend and I had already scheduled our long-overdue vacation in Japan for the first three weeks of July. Then at the last moment, a work trip to Zürich, Switzerland, that I thought I would not be going on turned out to be a go. Only one problem: the Zürich trip was going to end two days before the Japan trip began, and we already had tickets in hand to fly directly from San Francisco to Tokyo.

But what's a little jetlag between friends?

So as a result, I had the entirely disorienting experience of, between June 30th and July 2nd, spending a little over three days in as many continents: I left Zürich on the 30th, touched down at SFO, took a day and a half to re-pack all of my bags, and then jumped on a plane to Tokyo/Narita. I believe that I successfully murdered my own circadian rhythms with this exercise, and have emerged whole on the other side of jetlag: the world's first post-sleep human being.

In any case, I got to bum around two ancient countries that couldn't be more different, except for their mutual insistance on civic excellence. I took almost 3,000 photos and wrote in the neighborhood of 75,000 words about it. For the record and for your reading pleasure, it's all collected here.

The Travelogues

 

(Travelogues are presented in trip-chronological order, which may be somewhat different from the order they were actually written in.)

The Pictures

(Coming Soon! In the meantime, some edited highlights are intermixed with the travelogues themselves.)