Kyoto

I came back from Kyoto the day before yesterday. Yesterday I was amazed to make it to evening without sleeping, and went to bed at a good and reasonable time congratulating myself on somehow having escaped jet-lag, or perhaps just never having adapted properly in the short time I was away. But no, I was glad too soon. Here I am at two in the morning, having for the moment given up on the night. I have my alarm set for 5:30 in the morning, to go for a hike - but I don't think that's going to happen after all.

Kyoto: I only had five full days there. The conference started with registration and a welcome party on the afternoon and evening of the second day, then papers for the next two and a half days, and a group outing and sayonara party on the afternoon of the third day. I left again at lunchtime on the day following that.

The picture above was taken during the outing, in a brief ten minute bid for freedom. That is, after spending nine hours a day for two days sitting in a large and hot conference room battling my sleepiness and understanding scarcely anything, I was happy on the outing just to find a brief space when no-one would notice if I walked off on my own. We were at Arashiyama, with a few minutes free before dinner. As everyone stood on the bridge, I walked under the trees down the side of the river, and just at the point that the path ran out, I found this night heron. They're not an uncommon bird in Japan - there are so many water courses even in the middle of the city that you can see lots of herons, night herons, and egrets. The night before, in fact, I'd taken a short walk down by the river in the centre of town between Shijo and Sanjo. It's a stretch with lots of little restaurants overlooking it, romantic, lantern-lit, and popular with couples (and schoolgroups too, at this time of year). Between two sets of couples sitting on the bank, I saw a tall heron standing with a large fish dangling from its mouth. It's not usual to see them quite so close to people - evidently the herons of Kyoto are more sociable than most. It's the night herons like the one in the picture that I love, though. Such a nice shape.

The conference was interesting, in that I met for the first time a large group of people who share an interest in the author I've worked on. However, I was the only one of twenty-two or so presenters (and yes, we almost all sat through every paper - this wasn't the standard pick-and-choose kind of conference where you can slip out for a few hours and do something more fun) who elected to do it in English. I'd sat down to try and work on it in Japanese, but translating from the English of my thesis is a task well beyond my capabilities, and writing it all over again from scratch was more than I could face in the time I had available. Anyway, once there I was also reminded forcibly that my listening skills are also not up to scratch. I can concentrate on spoken Japanese for about half an hour a day, it turns out, before I have to spend the rest of the day just sitting gazing blankly at the speakers and schooling myself in patience. To be honest, I'm pretty terrible at concentrating on these things in English, too, but at least with English I can drift in and out now and then and pick up the main points.

It wasn't all bad, though. There was a handful of us who had come in from other countries, all staying in the Kyoto Royal Hotel. I didn't spend as much time with them as I would have liked - in the evenings they went out, but I was felled early each night by the jet-lag. I was with them enough, though, to be able to say that they were the nicest group of people I've ever met at a conference.

The outing and sayonara parties were also good in many ways, even if I was feeling so worn out that I didn't appreciate them as much as I could have done. I was just getting back into speaking in Japanese by that time, though, and so breaking through the feelings of hopeless inadequacy that I'd been beset by in the conference room, into the more optimistic frame of mind that sees a point in keeping working at this. My language skills do get rusty very quickly, even if I think I'm maintaining them through teaching and reading for classes. I actually need to sit down and learn and relearn vocabulary, and to make a habit of watching some Japanese TV programs or news streaming.

We went to a temple in the Western hills, Yoshimine-dera, that I'd never heard of. It's a very large complex on the side of a hill, with a path to climb up past all the main sites and then back down again.


It was all densely green, of course, something quite remarkable after Colorado. It's quite different to Scottish greenery too, which is much more about grassy hills. Japanese greenery is luxuriant in a way that is almost threatening - turn your back for a moment, and it'll take over entirely. The mountains are covered in impenetrable woods, all types of trees vying together.

Yoshimine-dera also had a display of ajisai - hydrangeas - on a little hillside of their own that you could climb up and down. They were quite gaudy and unreal looking, but what could be better in a Buddhist temple than something that looks like a representation of the illusion of life?

It had the obligatory fish-pond with ugly koi, too.

Afterwards we went to a quiet little temple, Jizō-in, where we sat for a while and looked over the shady garden and fed some mosquitoes. Then to the sayonara dinner. This was in traditional Japanese style - a large tatami room with two rows of little tables on the floor, distantly facing each other, so that I felt as if I was in the funeral scene of the film Ikiru, and also as if I was viewing a representation of the Last Supper on the other side of the room. Women in light green kimonos came in and out, kneeling in front of us to give us a series of small dishes, and to keep the beer flowing. I gave up on vegetarianism for the few days I was there and ate fish, for the sake of ease - and lucky I did, because it was of course central to this meal. Good, too. Whenever I do eat fish, I wish it wasn't so good.

One thing I'd like to have had more time to do is to take photos of signs - street signs, shop signs, those little instructions on trains to tell you not to stick your fingers in the electric doors, those kinds of things. When I'm teaching, I often want to show students how you encounter words in Japan - what makes Japan Japan, for me, in fact, is always this visual aspect, all the words around me, along with the particular ways of expressing things (like the men who stand in the street at roadworks and wave flags all day to warn and direct the traffic - now they actually have electronic screens with representations of men standing and waving flags, and bowing their apologies). I took a few such pictures while we were on the outing, but I need to go back soon and make a project of it.

City of No Sidewalks

Or Place of No Pavements, if you're British.

I arrived in Kyoto yesterday evening. Fell into bed around 6 p.m. and was awake and ready for coffee and a new day at 1:30 a.m. Right now I'm trying to stave off a second such night. If I can just stay awake for another hour or so, maybe...

I spent much of the day struggling with my conference paper, as usual (no - even more than usual) until this evening I reached the point of despair and cut and pasted a large section of my Ph.D. thesis, changing it absolutely minimally. Why didn't I do that days ago? Then I went out for a walk in the direction of Higashiyama, and I was reminded of the problems of having a city of streets so narrow that only one car can pass along them, and no sidewalks. It's a much more risky business walking around if you are unsteady with jet-lag.

Becoming Coloradan

A month has gone by, half of it in the final uphill struggle to the end of the academic year, the final exams, and the grading. I've been free for the last couple of weeks. Or semi-free - I have a paper to write by this time next week, when I'm leaving for a brief trip to Japan. It's hard to care right now.

Recently I've begun to hike, sometimes on my own - fear of mountain lions made me reluctant before, but it seems on reflection that in this country one has a much higher chance of being killed in a traffic accident or being gunned down in some random shooting incident than of being one of the handful of people mauled by predators each year. If I do get eaten, well, so be it. Better than sitting at home and bemoaning the downtown heat.


This Friday I hiked by myself up Bear Peak - one of those overlooking Boulder - by way of Shadow Canyon. Unusually green at the moment, and as with this whole stretch of the Front Range filled with interesting rock formations, as seen in the photo above. This is where the mountains begin, just west of Denver and Boulder. If you turn the other way, it's all flat.

Then on Saturday, I did my first 14er, like the budding Coloradan I am. These are our 14,000+ ft mountains, of which we apparently have 54 or so. People like to work their way through them. I should point out that we're a mile high in Denver before you even start driving into the mountains, so this isn't as impossible as it sounds. The hike I did this weekend was from Guenella Pass (11669 ft, as far as I can see) to the top of Mount Evans (14,264 ft). This time I went with a friend, which is lucky because it turned into a ten and a half hour hike all told, including a climb to the top of the neighboring Spalding in each direction, and I think I might have given up in despair in the willows that awaited us at the end if I'd been on my own.

I'd glanced at the book my friend has before we went, and seen mention of these willows as something that caused people to give up at the beginning of the hike. I didn't see why at the time, since to me willows meant beautiful supple trees that would be a pleasure to walk through. Giving up in a fresh green wood? Surely not. Here, however, it turns out to mean waist or head-high scrub-like stuff that is hellish to get through - thin and springy willow branches without the trunks, so that it is like navigating through a spiteful whippy maze. We did OK on the way up, but on the way down we were already exhausted, and the ground was running with water that had been solid mud or snow earlier in the day, and we couldn't find the main trail anywhere. Well, we got out in the end, obviously.

The hike up was a lot of fun - after the willows, bare mountain side, then snowy areas on top of Spalding, then a rocky ascent at the end. You come out to find everyone else already there - Mount Evans has a parking lot at the top. Here is the view from the top of Spalding, as we're about to sweep round towards Evans.


And here is the view one way from the top:


And the other way...


But the highlight of the day was my first mountain goat sighting. I've been scanning any mountain I've been to in the last four years hoping to see one of these, and so of course the first one I see turns out to be wandering by the roadside just beneath the summit of Evans.


Actually, we did see some looking more scenic on the crest of a rocky outcrop later, but this one was the First Goat and has a special place in my heart.

Iritis

I had a day off work sick today - I think the first I've taken in four years, and very welcome, especially by two in the afternoon when I should have been starting my upper-level class but was instead free to doze off. I was feeling much better by then, or I wouldn't have appreciated it so much.

I remember a little discomfort when I put my contact lenses in yesterday, but by the time I took them out in the evening my right eye had become quite red. It proceeded to get more red and sore through the night, and this morning I found that looking at my computer screen, glancing towards my still-curtained windows, looking at the screen of my cellphone, and anything else involving light caused me pain. I rang my medical provider. It's a very irritating system: you phone their central line, they ask you what is wrong and who you want to see, and then they take your number and tell you that the clinic will phone you. Last year I had a friend who had more than one serious medical emergency, and I experienced the frightening inefficiency of this system. This morning I sat around for an hour waiting for the clinic of my "family doctor" to phone me back, and then I gave up and phoned ophthalmology direct. They saw me half an hour later, so not everything is broken. They were also friendly and efficient. It's just that first bit of the process that frustrates me every time. I hope I don't have to deal with such a system at the end of my life. In the past couple of days I've been watching a Romanian film, The Death of Mr. Lazarescu, in which the aging and lonely Lazarescu is taken from hospital to hospital through a long night, slipping towards death as he goes because no-one except the ambulance woman will take responsibility for him. It's not like that here once you get into the system (at least if you have insurance), but actually getting into it sometimes seems quite difficult.

In any case, I learned that I was suffering from iritis, one of those things you never hear of until you have it. It seems to me it should be called irisitis, since iritis sounds like a kind of chronic uncontrollable anger. It really means, of course, that my iris is inflamed. Coming home on my bike in the bright Colorado sunshine was quite unpleasant - it developed into the head/brow-ache they'd told me people usually complained of. But, here is the wonder of modern medecine: three doses of the hourly eye-drops later and everything felt much better - redness fading, sensitivity decreasing. I was a little worried that I was going to go back to work tomorrow looking so entirely well that no-one would believe there had been anything wrong. However, I also have eye-drops to use twice a day to dilate the pupil in that eye, so actually I'm going to be looking a bit strange for the next few days.

The weather in Colorado.

Having been up to my knees in fresh powder on Friday, Monday turned out to be very warm and sunny. Our building got somewhat overheated, so that even my deathly cold office was suddenly uncomfortably warm instead. Then yesterday, Tuesday, it reached 27°C. I had to drive around a lot in the afternoon, and sweltered unpleasantly in my un-air-conditioned little car up and down the Interstate. This morning I looked out at the bright sunshine and realised that though I had been rather slow and reluctant to accept it, it was time to switch to summer clothing. I went to work in a light shirt - no sweater or jacket - and so naturally it was snowing by evening.

Atlanta

Another week passes in a frenzy of last-minute preparation. It was difficult to catch up after being away, especially since I came back from Atlanta late on Saturday night and got up early Sunday morning to go skiing. Monday to Thursday was a flurry of activity, and then I went skiing again yesterday. It's the last weekend of the season at Winter Park, but there was an enormous snowfall through Thursday and into Friday. Deep fluffy powder, and at the beginning of the day the top of the mountain was strewn with people fallen and falling like fat baby birds trying to leave the nest. It was such a funny sight that it was difficult to ski for laughing, as well as being just difficult to ski.

I meant to write up my visit to Atlanta earlier, but didn't have the time or energy through this week. It was an interesting trip, though. The paper went OK, though I galloped through it rather fast since it was clearly too long (too long for 25 minutes, and at the beginning our chair reminded us that we were supposed to try to stick to 20 minutes). Well, it was no great piece of innovative research, but it is a new line on my CV. We had no time for questions really, since the presenter after me had a lengthy equipment crisis.

I went to two other panels on the Friday afternoon and evening. In the evening one I wanted to ask a question. As I sat there formulating my question and then getting up the courage to actually break into the discussion and ask it, I felt myself going cold and clammy all over, and realized that after all this time this is the one thing that still completely terrifies me. It's absurd (though I've asked other people since and discovered that it's perhaps not unusual): I can present a paper and talk to the audience, I can stand in front of a class of 120 students and lecture, I can listen to student presentations and ask pertinent questions - none of these without some kind of nervousness, but also with an underlying quiet confidence - and yet faced with asking a question of a fellow academic in a room with perhaps only ten people in it, I'm horrified. It's funny, really. But yes, I formulated my question and asked it without exposing myself as an ignorant fraud (I hope).

Feeling as if I'd paid my dues by going to those panels on Friday, I took Saturday off and set out to see the High Museum of Art. I walked there from the hotel because I wanted to get a sense of Atlanta. For the previous two nights I'd made some attempt to walk out of Peachtree Center, which is a little island of big hotels and restaurants with a faceless corporate feel, but had given up at the sight of big roads and towering parking garages and wandering weird people. On Saturday I walked north up Peachtree Street, a long, busy, and largely unexciting road which nevertheless had a few interesting older buildings scattered along the way. As I got near the area where the museum should be, though, I mistakenly took a right turn instead of a left, and in a few strides I found myself in a quiet and astonishingly beautiful street, Peachtree Circle. I should say that in the three plus days I was in Atlanta, the weather was almost continually a light wet blowing drizzle, almost like walking through a cloud - the tops of the hotel towers were usually hidden in mist - and that it is presumably this climate that was responsible for the wonderful profusion of the gardens I came across. There were so many colours and textures - green lawns, maple and cherry and dogwood trees, sometimes roses trained over doorways, flowers of all kinds, pollen scents. The houses too were lovely - neat squared Georgian-looking buildings. I'd like to go back and look at more of this town. In the museum, the woman behind the desk told me that the area to the north was full of beautiful architecture, so next time I will go and look there.

The museum was great too. The building is very interesting - at the top of one wing you have a warehouse-like openness for the immense works of modern and contemporary art that mostly don't do much for me at all - all those canvases with just two or three colour blocks on them - but at the top of the next one is a wonderful play of space in the American folk art and contemporary art collections, where walls, pillars and framing windows keep changing the composition of what you're looking at. The collections themselves were unusual, too - especially the folk art collection, which was mostly modern Christian art, much of it African-American. It's nice to see something so exciting from a culture I otherwise find so alien (the earnest Christian side of it, that is) - a case in which putting something in a museum makes it easier (for me, at least) to encounter it. It makes it seem something unexpectedly productive, too.

I ran into one of my Boulder colleagues in the museum, and in the evening I ran into a number more. I saw some people from other places, too, but perhaps of all things re-establishing relationships with my local colleagues (who, for all that they are just up the road, I don't see often) was most worthwhile.

At leisure.

Atlanta, an hour before I present, and I have finished my paper. What shall I do with all of this free time (other than try and work out how I can cut out several pages of it as I speak)?

After almost twenty years at this, I still can't find a way to get over that initial writing block more quickly and to be able to write a readable sentence sooner than the just-a-little-bit-too-late that has me out of bed at 5 am or earlier three days in a row. Oh well.