RETRO TRAVELOGUE

UPDATED BELOW

It’s been quite a while since I have blogged. Time just got away from me. After all the Ethiopian blogging I knew I would not be able to continue that pace as I returned to school. But then I finished up with my coursework in December and I thought, for sure, that I would resume blogging with a forcefulness heretofore unknown. For various reasons, mostly doing with personal laziness, it never happened. Other than the 2008 Movie Roundtable Spectacular and a few posts emphasizing the virtues of the original Planet of the Apes movies I have been AWOL. Irreconcilably AWOL.

I would like to use a recent move, from the west village to the east village, as an excuse for my slothfulness but that won’t hold water or pass muster. The move may yet have a positive effect on my blogging. (Not to mention that my current living situation should provide me with many entertaining anecdotes.) In the course of rummaging through items, to determine whether to discard or pack, I unearthed journals I kept during previous travels. These are handwritten entries either in an actual journal, a notepad, or just scraps of paper that highlight what I did, adventures I had, and thoughts and ruminations on past vacations. These are nothing like the three months I spent in Ethiopia except that the locales, the customs, and the peoples were all new to me. (So I guess it was like Ethiopia but shorter and I felt more like a visitor rather than I was living there.)

I look forward rereading my journal entries and transforming them into blog posts. I’ll be able to relive my experiences with the added benefit of hindsight and, of course, incorporating a dash of my usual pizzazz into these now electronic posts. I will begin with my 2007 trip to Hong Kong and Japan.* If this goes well and I keep it up I’ll continue with my previous trips to Europe in 2003 and 2001. Hmmm, I guess I didn’t go anywhere for four years.

*UPDATE*I did two blog posts about Japan here and here. This will just be catching up on everything that happened around these two incidents.