My days in Bangalore are fast coming to an end. It now feels like home to both myself and my family. But when I first arrived, being driven from the airport to the city, I was wondering where we had landed. Let me tell you more.
Even at the brand new airport, the roads were pitted. Tractors approached us on our side of the dual carriageway. Road lanes were merely decoration if they were there at all. Road rules, well they were obviously different. For the whole trip both my wife and I tried to resolve, in our own private thoughts, whether or not we had made a mistake. All those exotic photographs of people traveling on foot, or even a whole family on a motorbike, well we were now in that picture. The strange site of people urinating on the road side, oh my, is it all like this? To cap it off, when we first arrived at our flat we were greeted by the sounds of our local mosque and its call to prayer permeating the air. When I walked into the kitchen, our neighbours who I could see through our kitchen window were in flowing white robes. Oh boy, sensory overload!
With the 3 months that I have been away from Japan, I have once again regained that innocent excitement about traveling to somewhere new. Bangalore and India is now commonplace. And it is of revisiting Japan that I am now focused.
Though it is years since my first Japan visit, my senses were equally quite overloaded. No, not in the same way, but by the alien world in which I had arrived.
My wife doesn’t like the word Orient. She does not see that she is from the east, let alone the far east. Look at a map – Japan is in the centre – which in Japan it is. It is just a technicality that zero degrees longitude is elsewhere.
I can’t imagine the experience for those first westerners arriving in Japan. If my history is correct, in 1542 some Portuguese shipwrecked on the coast of Japan. And it was the next year that the first official Portuguese trading fleet arrived.
Japan can still provide me with that initial buzz, the anticipation of the exotic, of things even now only partially understood. Maybe the simplest of examples will convey some of that alien world that I sought and once found. For many people, the first visit to a shop will have them wondering in what way they are being greeted. いらっしゃいませ (Irasshaimase)! Not just once, but many times, and if they are ladies it will be in high pitched minnie mouse voices. No, they won’t stop at just one greeting. And you’d better watch out – if it’s a multi store outlet then get ready to cringe! To my fellow travellers, here’s a toast “To travel and all that it brings” :-)
ADDENDUM: Thank you for the request to add that which I had forgotten :-) . Actually I wanted readers to wonder and check – the beginnings of every great travel adventure! Nonetheless, in a shop, irasshaimase means “Welcome!”.
