Articles
Tokyo
Monday 27 February 2006
No, I haven't been sending out emails to say that I've updated my site. Apologies to those who were expecting me to, but I really don't like unnecessarily filling up other people's inboxes. At the end of my last Travel Log entry I briefly mentioned the site's RSS feed. If you don't know what RSS is, you can find a potted summary of the technology at the bottom of the sidebar on these pages.
If you really can't be bothered with RSS (I do recommend that you make the effort if you've never tried before), I've set up an email-subscription service, to which you can subscribe from the same place. That service (powered by FeedBlitz) basically checks the RSS feed for you and then sends an email to its subscribers when the Travel Log (and therefore, feed) is updated.
Osaka, Kobe & Ise
Monday 20 February 2006
There I was, standing in a chemical factory, minding my own business. Suddenly one of the drums burst into flames: it burned for a few seconds before the heat it was producing (which I could feel from over 30ft away) ignited the surrounding drums. Another few seconds went by, and then the whole room was awash with flame — the fire was lapping up the three other walls. Fine, I just needed to get out of the room while my path was still clear. The sprinklers did their thing (a little bit late, if you ask me) and deposited a fine mist of water over the room. This only had the effect of fanning the flames, and the fire was burning more fiercely than ever.
I stood there, transfixed by the sight of what was going on around me. The renewed vigour of the flames had
Nagasaki and Hiroshima
Monday 13 February 2006
This entry is going to be a little different from those that precede it: I'm going to try to write it 'thematically' rather than chronologically. Alan de Botton, in his book The Art of Travel, talks about how if we were going to travel in a structured fashion, we would be traversing the world from one sight to the next in order to be able to make informed comparisons. I can't remember the example he gives. If anyone can post it here, then that would be good. Let's see how this goes.
To be honest, I hadn't meant to go on an 'atomic bomb tour': things just turned out in a way that meant that I went first to Nagasaki (on pretty much the most south-western point of the four 'main' Japanese islands) and then to Hiroshima. My time in Hiroshima was accompanied by
Japan: Arrival, Takayama, Kyoto and Nara
Sunday 5 February 2006
This is going to be another long one, I’m afraid. I’m trying to improve my ‘writing for the Web’ style and produce shorter paragraphs, which are supposedly easier to speed read (especially on a screen) but I don’t know if I’ll succeed. I have, however, made it so that the entry fills a wider area once past the sidebar. I’ve also introduced the ‘Contents’ on the right-hand side so that you can jump directly into a part of the entry further down.I hope these developments help with the general readability of the travel log—as always I welcome your comments.
Arrival
Japan was the land of the setting sun as my flight from Taipei landed on Wednesday of last week. Sitting on the bus into Tokyo from Narita airport (a 90-minute journey), I was able to remark how it much more
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