This vacation is a write-off

[rachelmanija]

Literally. Me, next year, my tax guy, my taxes-- it's a date. (The only one I'm sure of having next year.) I've been sick with something or other virtually the entire time, and since there's been no improvement with whatever horrible virus I have right now after a week of mostly lurking in my hotel room and only emerging for food, I have a feeling I'm not going to be better till I get back. Possibly some time after I get back. I suspect a particularly nasty form of bronchitis.

Yesterday I made it two blocks out of the hotel, to an Edo-period house called "The Sumiya House" which is all wood and the only surviving building of its kind-- a high-class entertainment facility for geisha and samurai and really successful merchants. I got sucked into being part of a tour conducted entirely in Japanese, which mostly sounded like this: "...Five hundred seventy years... Edo... three hundred forty-six years... Tokugawa... geisha... Sumiya.... Two hundred ninety years... samurai... three things... Genpei... Sumiya... One piece of wood... Five hundred forty years... Sumiya... pine tree... up to two hundred years... sakura."

Every now and then the guide would say something utterly incomprehensible, and the ladies I was with would all gasp and exclaim, "Wow! Incredible! Fantastic! I never knew that before!"

At the first of two lovely indoor gardens, I was trying so hard not to have a coughing fit that my eyes watered. I think the lady beside me thought I was overcome by the beauty of the sakura and the pine tree, which might or might not have been up to two hundred years old.

The other garden was meant to be viewed from a room which had a painting of Fuji-san. Here occurred the only times when the guide got the women to exclaim "Wow! Amazing!" that I understood: A beam along the ceiling consists of a single piece of wood. A piece of the floor and a pillar are made of pine from a single tree and each are in one piece. And (this one made me gasp) if you sit on the right place on the floor beside the Fuji painting and look out into the garden, a rock appears exactly the shape of Fuji-san. If you stand up, it just looks like a rock.

Also, there was a sword rack (I could read that kanji) and the guide did a little mime of guests leaving their swords. I think, but I'm not positive, that he said that the staff member who took the sword attached a little tag to it with the name of the owner, and put another tag in a drawer so the swords could be matched with their owners later.

That was all I could manage for the day. After that I retreated to the hotel room to continue my routine of lying in bed with a box of tissues and my laptop (the hotel has wireless). Unfortunately, I'm not up to the level of sustained concentration it would take to write something more complex than little journal entries, so the particular tax write-off this trip will be is going to be "Trip undertaken for business purposes (ie, Anime Expo, writing research; failed due to filer's illness; no income generated.)

Comments

[jonquil.livejournal.com]

Imagine being a katana-check girl. Oh, the happy.

I'm so sorry about the bronchitis; that isn't at all fair.

[minnow1212.livejournal.com]

Oh, no, bronchitis sucks.

>I think, but I'm not positive, that he said that the staff member who took the sword attached a little tag to it with the name of the owner, and put another tag in a drawer so the swords could be matched with their owners later.<

This is wonderful.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Oh, geeze, I am so sorry.

Hey, if you're ever in the Boston area, let me know. I'd be up for anime, going to restaurants (particularly a Japanese one where you can order for us in Japanese), and introducing you to disc golf.

[misia.livejournal.com]

Good. Writing it off on your taxes is smart, smart, smart.

As for my story of barfing my way across Taiwan...

In 1991 I went to Japan, Taiwan, and South Korea as a paid ringer in a chamber choir that was going on tour. I was young, intrepid, and okay, maybe a little stupid: I did everything, I ate everything, I drank everything, I went everywhere.

This was fine in Japan. But Japan has, y'know, modern sewage systems and generally very high quality food and drink and so forth. So my snarfing barely-done shabu-shabu beef in Kyoto, or buying fruit from vendors in Osaka, or sharing sashimi in Nagasaki was no big deal.

Then we went to Taiwan, and I spent two solid weeks puking and battling dysentery, and though I never missed a concert until the bitter end, and even then not due to gastrointestinal upset, I sure did spend a lot of time rushing headlong to the nearest loo where I would temporarily regret being so intrepid. But no sooner would I recover than I would launch out, dragging my half-Taiwanese friend Weilun behind me as an interpreter, off to go check out the Taipei night market or find out whether that interesting-looking beach place we'd seen on the way to the hotel had barbecued squid that was as good as it smelled... or whatever. I might never get the chance again, so why not, right?

I ate grilled lamb's lung from street carts and sea snail stew on the beach, crispy grilled squid on skewers while I wandered through the night markets, and durian smoothies with a bunch of Buddhist monks. I bought fruit from street vendors. I sneered at quite a few of my fellow choristers who were spending their time in Asia living on white rice and whatever prepackaged American foods they could find.

Mind you, they didn't get sick. And they had no pity for me, because clearly, I had brought it on myself.

Finally, though, what laid me low and landed me in the hospital was sun poisoning and sunburn, not my innards rebelling. I made the mistake, pale Eastern European thing that I am, of going to the beach one afternoon in Fengpang when we had the day off, near the southern tip of the island. I wore a T-shirt over my swimsuit, and SPF 30 sunblock, but that close to the equator I think what was called for was probably an asbestos burqa.

Blisters the size of dinner plates on my back and chest, miserable as hell, I was taken to a hospital ER in a taxi -- which is its own long story of backwater Taiwan freakshow -- and then, on the way back to the hotel, taken to a traditional Chinese doctor as well. The Chinese doctor insisted that I should not take the medicine the Western-trained doctors had given me, and instead gave me a mixture to make tea of and sip several times a day, plus a foul-smelling ointment.

You guessed it: the tea made me puke. Uncontrollably. I can only guess that it had something in it that I was allergic to. I have no idea what that might've been. Or it might've been that I was so sick from sun poisoning that I was reacting to things I wouldn't have normally. There are few things I want to repeat less than projectile vomiting while feeling the humongous blisters on my back and chest weeping beads of pus that trickled down over horrifyingly sensitive sunburned skin. FOrtunately the cream I was given worked a treat even though it smelled terrible -- it was an anaesthetic balm that burned like a bastard but then had me pain-free for at least an hour at a go.

I missed three concerts, the last two in Taiwan and the first one in Seoul, before my burn had healed up enough that I could even attempt to sing. And I survived a week in South Korea on rice, the occasional well-cooked vegetable dish, and Coca-Cola before we headed home to the States... I wasn't touching ANYTHING that hadn't been boiled, at that point.

The moral of the story: If you must travel the way I do, pack lots of Imodium and don't go to the beach!

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Wow, that makes me feel better in comparison. I had wondered if it was difficult for you to travel in countries where you don't speak the language because of your milk allergy, but of course Asian countries don't tend to use much milk anyway. But you got the barfing anyway. And sun poisoning! I never even heard of that before, but I'm of the tan-not-burn skin tone and not much of a lier-on-beaches anyway.

I've never had a major gastrointestinal upset in a foreign country, though I've had minor ones-- I define minor as "no mad dashes to the toilet-- a quick walk is OK-- and no vomiting." But I've really only traveled in Japan, which is very sanitary, and India, where I'm probably both acclimated to the germs and have a canny sense of what's safe to eat and drink:

OK: non-bottled water in New Delhi and other major cities where people living there tell you it's safe to drink. Tea and food from any roadside shack your driver eats at. The interiors of fresh fruits and vegetables. Any restaurant food. Food from stalls at a bazaar. Food from anyone's house, even if it's a cowdung hut (you should be lucky enough to get invited for a homecooked meal.)

May kill you, but you may have to drink it anyway and die of politeness: Water from someone's house. Actually, this doesn't come up if you know to say, "Yes, I would love a cup of tea" when it's offered. Because you're the guest and you're going to be fed something, so you might as well pick the safe option.

Will probably give you some bug or other: Non-bottled water in small towns or villages. Sugarcane juice-- the kind squeezed by a rusty press swarming with flies on the back of a cart. Unwashed fruit and vegetable peels.

Not dangerous but probably disgusting: Western-style food anywhere but in a very good restaurant in a big city. Rule of thumb: if it's misspelled on the menu, don't order it. Cornflex, cornflacks, fred egg, veg soap, veg ball with cronchi, leg of lamp, veg sandwitch, and similar items are likely to taste exactly like the spellings indicate.

[misia.livejournal.com]

I like the idea of fred egg, for some reason.

In hindsight I suspect that what my problem was in Taiwan was that I contracted some sort of low-level stomach bug early on and kept aggravating it because I was stupid like that -- I can be unhelpfully good at ignoring low-level discomfort until it becomes critical -- instead of just taking it easy and giving myself time to heal up completely. So now I know, if I ever end up going there again.

I have to say that I really loved Taiwan. It's beautiful and the people are very open and inquisitive about visitors, particularly when you get out of Taipei (which is interesting, but in some ways just another Big City, and very polluted). In Japan, I rarely had the experience of people just walking up to me in the street or the public market to ask me where I was from and why I was visiting their town, even when I was outside of the big cities; in Taiwan, it was pretty common to have people just strike up a conversation even when they knew you didn't speak Chinese and they didn't speak English. Lots of pointing and nodding and gesturing. Very informal, especially after Japan.

You might enjoy visiting someday. Especially in the south, there are hordes of natural hot springs, many of which have been turned into soaking spa-type baths and are about as far from onsen, culturally, as you can get without going to California and going hot tubbing. Families bobbing around in the soup, giggling kids playing with beachballs, muddy un-paved paths, picnickers, and such. It's very laid-back.

Fortunately, when I was there I didn't have to worry about the dairy issue at all -- not only does dairy just not figure much in most Asian cuisines (yay!) but I wasn't allergic to casein back then. The allergy set in only in the last year or so, oddly enough.

[thomasyan.livejournal.com]

Eek! While visiting Thailand, I had a mild case of sunburn. I had put on sunblock, so I thought nothing of sitting outside the boat in the sun in nothing but short pants. It was cool watching the flying fish jumping out of the water.

Later that day I learned that if you lie on your back on painted metal, the sunblock can smear off, leaving you unprotected. Luckily, no blisters for me.

[kaigou.livejournal.com]

I almost quake to think just what kind of research one might be doing at AnimeExpo. The life and times of fangirls? The showering habits of fanboys?

Hmm, wonder if I can write off my own trip...

[rachelmanija.livejournal.com]

Oops. I meant the Anime Fair in Tokyo, not the Anime Expo in southern California.

Since I write manga and do freelance TV development, that actually was a legitimate business expense.