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

[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.