And so I emerged bright and fresh from Leicester Square station only to realise that I had absolutely nothing to do. All the West End shows were expensive. Couldn’t go shopping because there’s no point spending all my money (and more importantly, valuable bag space) in London. Couldn’t go out anywhere because I didn’t know anyone. This is the problem with travelling alone - you can’t really do anything interesting by yourself, and so you end up wandering up Oxford Street in a daze, dodging tourists and buying footlong subs. So this is it, I thought. Me, travelling again, and already I’ve run out of things to do.

I passed a red sign on Oxford Street written in katakana. “ユニクロ”, it said, and I smiled with mild amusement. This popular chain of low-price fashion shops is just called UNIQLO in Japan. Over there, having the name in English is cool. Over here, having the name in Japanese is cool. What a strange world.

Eventually I thought “screw it, I’m going to the theatre.” So I went to the tkts booth and got one for Spamalot, the Eric Idle-produced Pythonesque musical at the Palace Theatre. I went for Spamalot because I can always see Avenue Q in New York if I so desire, which is really its natural habitat.

After that, everything else fell neatly into place. I wandered into Chinatown, passed an authentic-looking Japanese restaurant which took me back a little, stumbled across Wardorf Street where I made sure to pay my respects to Paul Weller, spent a happy half-hour browsing Forbidden Planet, and then came back to the hotel to get ready for the Theatre. Ooh, the Theatre.

Having packed everything I thought I might need and a few things I probably won’t, we embarked to the train station, though not before picking up my passport and tickets which I had absent-mindedly left on the kitchen table. Naturally, I was so worried about forgetting something minor that I forgot the most important thing.

Two hours of travel later, which I spent alternating between reading New Scientist, eating a tikka wrap, and writing microfiction about decomposing corpses, I arrived at London Liverpool Street, from where I took a sweltering Tube train to Angry Monarch/Patron of Digestive Organs, otherwise known as King’s Cross St Pancras.

I arrived at my stop-off for the night: the Alhambra Hotel, a pleasant little bed-and-breakfast off Euston Road. Having gotten my keys, I let myself into my room, deposited my staggeringly heavy backpack, placed a pork pie thoughtfully on the bedside table, went to the toilet, and proceeded to lock myself out of the room.

Thus it was that I appeared at the reception about thirty seconds after previously departing, complaining in that unique apologetic English style: “I’m terribly sorry to bother you, but I seem to have been a terrible ass and locked myself out.”

So, I have an evening in London to waste. Probably just wander around Oxford Street and Soho for a while. Or perhaps I’ll see a show, if I can get cheap tickets from that hut in Leicester Square.

(Incidentally, of interest to me only, I managed to get the iPhoto to Gallery plugin working, finally! For future reference, it only required uninstalling the ImageMagick and NetPBM plugins and reinstalling GD. Basically all this means is that I can upload directly from iPhoto, rather than the tortuous process of exporting them and then uploading them with Gallery Remote.)

I admit, I feel strangely petrified.

Not in an ordinary sense, fear of plane crashes or muggings or a poor exchange rate, but in a more existential angst way. I’ve been looking forward to this trip for quite a while now, and now it’s here so quickly I’m not entirely sure I’m prepared for it, mentally.  When travelling, you have to adopt a new mindset - a solitary one, a mind adapted to planning and navigation and, if you’re keeping a blog, documenting the people and locations and events you come across. And in adopting this new mindset, you become a different person.

So, not only are you thrown out of your comfort zone and thrust into a different land with different people and different currency and different customs, you don’t even know yourself. You travel around for a week or two, carefully recording all you see, then you get back home, shed your spent travelling personality like a larval cocoon, and revert to your old personality in order to assimilate all that you’ve seen while away. It’s a very weird transition, and completely imperceptible when it’s occurring.

The person who wrote these notes died the day he stepped back on Argentine soil. The person who is reorganizing and polishing them, me, is no longer me, at least I’m not the me I was. Wandering around our ‘America with a capital A’ has changed me more than I thought.

– Che Guevara

Oh, guess who gonna be in Chicago the same time as me. Warren Ellis himself.

“I love travelling. I love travelling alone. It is a Zen process. Even in these days of airport bullshit. It’s a method to be followed, details to be absorbed in. I travel with hand luggage only. Loose clothes, shoes I can slip off easily, no metal, a shirt with a breast pocket for passport and boarding pass, keys and change zipped into the luggage along with all devices before I check in. I’m off the cane right now, which makes things a lot easier. I always buy two books in the airport bookstore. Always smoke two cigarettes before I enter the airport. Always say hello and thank you to security — maintain the concentration to see that they’re people who do a job rather than faceless extensions of The Man. Never roll over, but never be anything less than reasoned and kind. Remember: you’re going somewhere interesting and they’re not.”

Maybe we’ll bump into each other, and I’ll finally be able to apologise for leaving a slightly critical comment on his Livejournal years ago (to which he replied “Lucky you’re not paying for this, then.”). I need to catch up on Freakangels, and the rest of Transmetropolitan. I’m not hip enough.

I had been slightly apprehensive about this trip, given that I had planned for Japan for months before hand, and with this it’s all come together in the last week. But, as long as I don’t forget anything, I’m surprised to realise that there’s not a lot I need to do. I have printed out my tickets, organised my insurance information carefully, gathered together my important travelling possessions (travel sink plug: check; US socket adapter: check; bungee cord: nowhere to be found, but oh well) and I’m surprised to find that I can travel very, very light. I mean, a bunch of clothes, my bag of electrical gear/batteries, and my documents holder, and that’s all I basically need. (I think.)

So I can begin to get excited instead. There are a billion things to do in New York, so planning for that wasn’t a problem, but Chicago… Chicago simply isn’t as exposed as NY, and so I really honestly didn’t know anything about it beyond the Sears Tower, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Meigs Field, the default airport on Microsoft Flight Simulator (strangely absent in FSX: many months later, I discovered that the Mayor of Chicago had gone insane and destroyed the runway literally overnight with bulldozers in 2003).

A couple of days of investigation later, and it’s overflowing with stuff to do. I’m planning to spend an entire day in expansive Grant Park; there’s the Magnificent Mile for random expenditure; the Loop for city block wandering; and a boat trip down the river, ogling at architecture.
In contrast, New York is beginning to baffle me. I mean, where do I begin? Do I take it as it comes, or plan meticulously? Will I have time to see David Byrne’s exhibition? When I step out of my hostel at 4pm on Tuesday… where should I go first?

I had been feeling mild apprehension about heading ‘cross the Pond, alone again, travelling with no direction home and other such cliches. What if I miss a train? What if I miss a flight? What if I get lost? What if I get mugged? What if I don’t get to do all I want to do?

To which the answers are: a) get the next one, b) you always turn up an hour earlier than you need to anyway, c) do what you always do - find a train station and head to somewhere you know, d) hand over your money and think of the insurance and what a good story this will make, and e) New York will still be there in ten years, so there’s no need to see everything in four days.

I have rediscovered the sheer usefulness of a notebook. I had one in Japan and I didn’t realise just how staggeringly useful it was until I didn’t have one and I was struggling to remember everything. Notebooks are great: there are no batteries, they fit in a pocket, they have no multitude of different formats, you can write and jot and sketch and plan, and if you lose it, just buy a new one.

I’ve put down a rough plan of the trip: get the tube at 6:30, check in at 8:30, get bus to hostel at 15:00, and so forth. It’s somewhat useful just to have a set of instructions to follow to achieve productive tourism.

I have also been researching events which are going on: there are some jazz events going on in New York, which would be fun, a walking tour in Harlem chronicling the growth of hip-hop, and on Saturday 28th two events in Grant Park, Chicago, which I may well make a day of: Adler Planetarium in the morning, the Taste of Chicago food festival for lunch, the Art Institute in the afternoon, and finally a free outdoor classical music concert in the evening. I can’t think of anything more pleasant.

On a totally unrelated topic, I’ve just stumbled across the Wikipedia page of Last Occurrences: which is to say, the things that will never, ever, happen again in the history of the world. Depressing.

January 21 2008 - Marie Smith Jones, last native Eyak language speaker, dies in Alaska at age 89.

Yes, that should do nicely.

I wanted a theme that really has photographs as the centre, and after a little jiggery-pokery this one seems to fit the bill. Slightly annoying when an embarrassing photo of me shoots up at 500 px on the main page, but can’t be helped. (Unfortunately.)

I keep finding myself refreshing the page, looking at the random photos that come up. I used to look at other people’s blogs, and they always had such incredible photos on. I’d think, “Why can’t I take photos as beautiful as those?” And now I find myself looking at amazing photos of Japan, and thinking: “Whoa, did I really take those?” It’s only with six months’ reflection that I can look back and actually enjoy my photos for what they are.

If there’s one thing I love, it’s breaking something, then fixing it again.

Hence, I just completed a very clumsy but long-awaited upgrade to Wordpress 2.5.1. What does it do? Well, I don’t know, but hopefully I’ll have ironed out a couple of the bugs which have inevitably cropped up over my site’s lifespan.

Now to fix up the theme and get the Gallery2 intergration back in…

Oh, it’s all change here, as I dig out my rusty CSS skills to give the site a little bit of a mocha-and-cream makeover. For a ten-minute palette swap, I’m reasonably pleased with it all. I just hope the Gallery still works, in my metaphorical dusting-off of the site.

(edit) Actually, I think I prefer the blue.

Had things gone different, I might well be counting down my last three months in Japan today. Plans may change, but my desire to travel does not, and so here I am announcing my intentions to visit the United States and Europe this summer. I guess I’ll dress up the old blog a bit, bring in some new curtains and a shiny new banner.