Sat, 22 Dec 2007
Tokyo Thursday
At the start of the summer, I read an article by a journalist who successfully worked for his U.S.-based company while wandering South America for a month. No one knew that when he interviewed them over Skype, he said, he was thousands of miles away.
That sounded pretty good, so I wanted to try it. I was invited to speak on behalf of Science Commons, and Herbert had been to Japan but I hadn't, so I thought that this trip to Tokyo would be a good one to start with. Some basic notes (more later, hopefully):
- Weekends are really useful. If you're working in the daytime, you'll miss out on lots of great things that can only happen in the afternoon.
- You'll miss people from home. Some of them might miss you too, but you'll have less way of knowing that.
- Plans are useful. Guide books that have walking tours with lists of places to go, marked on the map of the walking tours, are immensely helpful.
- Seeing people takes time. If you're lucky (or if you're smart), you can arrange to see people in places you actually wanted to go in the first place. Maybe you can do what I'm doing today, which is (hopefully) seeing an act of a Kabuki play somewhere before meeting up with people, or maybe you can manage to chat with people as you walk through some nice park. Otherwise, be aware that you're adding to the places you have to go see.
- Speaking French is fun, and it's one of the few activities where if people compliment you don't have to feel bad accepting the compliment.
Just before and after committing to my plane tickets, as I remarked that I was leaving Tokyo on a Saturday, I wondered, Maybe I should extend this so I have the weekend in Tokyo. The big lesson from this trip is, Yes, you need weekends. You weren't really able to use the weekend of the conference, and you could have predicted as much way earlier.
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