Tag Archives: Travel

An Interlude

No category

Anyone who keeps the ability to see beauty never grows old.– Franz Kafka

We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing. George Bernard Shaw

I turned Eighty-Five in June of 2025 CE, and it was my roughest birthday yet. For years, I’ve thought of myself as a much younger person than my actual age. If I had a physical problem – and I’ve had a lot of physical problems – I sort of thought about it as something that could be fixed, a repair like a leaking radiator on a car. Fix the leak and zoom away. Even then, when I really think about it, I knew I was getting old, but not really…old.

A couple of months before my birthday, I fell on a wet flight of stairs, breaking a little bone in my hand, from which my hand is still numb. At about the same time as my birthday, I had my first of two cancer surgeries, two cataract surgeries, which made it difficult to read, and a major problem with my jaw that is probably arthritis related. All this over a background of arthritis that is getting worse. It is not the first time that I’ve felt old, but the first time I’ve felt chronically old. I feel like I’ve become obsessed with ageing and its associated degradation of my body and mind.

To add to that, I lost, left really, my phone in a cab in Paris, and it is now tied up in French Customs. I don’t consider myself a big phone user, but I really miss it. Then our house phone battery failed, so I felt completely isolated. I thought I did, that is, until my computer’s hard drive started freezing and I lost my email connection.

I probably will not find out if I’m cancer-free for a while, and even if I am now cancer-free, I will have six weeks of chemotherapy to be sure. On the plus side, I passed my driver’s vision test, and I can now read the New Yorker’s cartoons without glasses. We have a new house phone with the same number but no saved numbers of other people. I now have a new 2-TWO-terabyte hard drive, which is pitched as being faster and more reliable than my old drive.

Meanwhile, back in Paris, we went to a David Hockney show in a museum designed by Frank Gehry.

Driving From Yuzawa To Joetsu To Kanazawa

Japan, Photography, Travel

Yuzawa is a resort town in the Japanese Alps. Well, the Chamber of Commerce says that Yuzawa is in the Japanese Alps, so I should believe them. However, I think the signature feature of the Swiss Alps, which tops out at 14,691 feet, is its glaciated topography. The Japanese Alps top out at 10,475 feet, so they may have had lots of glaciers, but Yuzawa is at only 3,875 feet, and there was not a sign of glaciation anywhere.

Still, there were ski slopes and chairlifts, and I was reminded that it snows at sea level here. We stayed in a large stand-alone hotel that kind of reminded me of the hotel on the Indian Reservation near the newly formed Tulare Lake. We were here to see at least part of the Echigo-Tsumari Art Triennale and, especially, the Kiyotsukyo Gorge Tunnel.

The next three nights, we spent in Joetsu, an off-the-tourist road city, so we could double back to the eastern part of Triennal and then drove – mostly along the coast – to Kanazawa, at the center of the tourist road. We are now in Kanazawa, surrounded by American – or, at least, European-American looking – young people.

This part of Japan is known for its rice and its sake. Michele says that the rice is very good, but my taste buds aren’t refined enough to taste the difference between this rice and, say, Luna Koshihikari Organic Rice from the Sacramento Valley. The Sake was different; the local stuff was terrific.

As we leave the shoreline, we come back into rice country. I’m amazed at how the rice fields seem to fill every empty space, but on reflection, I think it is probably the opposite. As family fields get divided between heirs, some sell their plot and it then gets filled with buildings.