06.16.09
Overview of the Japan trip
This post really needs to be written.
I keep getting people who are envious of my having gone to Japan for 10 days and frankly, I wouldn’t mind the envy if I actually had fun — but since I didn’t, I really feel like I need to clarify some things.
First of all, we were traveling with a Tenrikyo pilgrimage group. This means several things:
- We traveled a lot. We flew to Fukuoka and traveled to Tenri by bus. This pretty much meant that we were mostly on the bus for at least 5 days. This was very, very, very boring — if you couldn’t tell.
- We were “expected” to wake up at about 6:30 every single morning to go to “morning classes”, or their version of prayer. We also participated in “evening classes”. This involved kneeling on a tatami for at least 50 minutes every single day, and it was often for somewhat longer than that. Waking up that early to get pins and needles every day is not my idea of a good time, if you couldn’t tell.
- We ate with the group — which meant some fish, lots of seaweed, no meat, and rice with miso soup. Unsurprisingly, a good number of the group got constipation.
- We slept in their chapterhouses. This meant sleeping on tatami floors on futon pads that were little more than thick quilts, about 9 to a room, with multiple snoring people. This means that I pretty much didn’t sleep much at night.
Secondly, because the places we were going to visit was worked in between traveling from one end of Japan to somewhere near the middle, this meant several more things:
- Because 20 people going to the bathroom every single time we stopped took up more time than the person who set up the itienary expected, so we actually had very little time to actually linger or savour or even experience wherever we went. We would be short of time by the time we actually arrived at our destination so everything was cut short. So. Not much time for wandering, little for taking pictures, none for eating any of the snack foods that were being sold by peddlers. No time to get a cup of coffee, none to shop for souvenirs, and not quite enough to go to the bathroom properly either, which of course helps with the constipation. Think about it. We visited multiple shrines and ended up not going into one because we ran out of time, speedwalking so fast through the other one that we didn’t even get to pray to whoever was in the shrine, and totally bypassing another despite getting on a bloody ferry to get to and from it.
- Having 20 people who are never on time doesn’t help anything.
- There was no way to cut out some destinations so we could spend more time at one or two because then there were the whiners who just wanted “more! more! more!” and would get cranky if they felt like they weren’t getting their money’s worth.
- Being forced to speedwalk through stuff sucks.
- Having 20 people in a travel group pretty much sucks, period. It took forever to get everyone a ticket, forever to wait for everyone to finish whatever they were doing, and forever to do anything.
So. I ended up with a cold on the 7th day because of lack of sleep, stress over the constant time issues, and because someone else in the room had a cold and gave it to us. I then proceeded to be sick for the next month. This on top of being fiercely allergic to Japan and Taiwan.
Yes. I’m whining.
This is because I’m really tired of unwarranted envy. So I decided to go out and whine about every single thing I hated about that trip. I might make a “what I enjoyed” post but then that might get me more envy that I really don’t need.
There’s probably going to be another whiny post about why traveling in huge groups suck. But this might do it for now.