No place like 127.0.0.1

[Marine]

Home... So many songs deal about it, don't you think ?Even for someone as blasé as me, Japan is such a place ! It's huge. So much space and so many who fit in. Crowd phobia did hit me in a way I had yet to discover as night had fallen in Tokyo, and I found peace at the very top of the city, watching life going on without me. I fell in love with the simplicity of a sunny afternoon in Nikko. I watched the landscape through the Shinkansen windows and asked my way for Saitama on the platforms with my three sentences of Japanese... I helped complete strangers and felt good about it; I saw the fate of complete strangers in the Unforgettable Fire and struggled to keep the tears inside. I saw what spirituality could be like, was tempted but didn't fall, slipped barefoot on pieces of high life and came back to myself under a red gate in the sea. I got lost in the Electric City and felt comfortable in the subway, desperately looking for a man and a fat girl in a pink suit but couldn't find them. I ate all those weird things I could not identify and found a neologism to describe the beef I ate in that posh restaurant in which I didn't belong with my dirty jeans and destroyed bag. I listened to music while passing under the Thousand Torii of Kyoto, drank wine in fine company between a waterfall and half-scared, half-curious monkeys, lasted a week before I had to know what went on in the world, almost passed out from the heat of the water of that Matsuyama Onsen, screamed at the top of my voice in a rollercoaster near the Tokyo Dome, was shown my own stupidity in Yokohama and got back to childhood watching deers in Nara. I got bitten so many times it was funny, forgot my umbrella in Ginza, got a sunburn in the middle of October, sent postcards to people I have never seen and thought of home.I tried to make up for all the rudeness of Western people, but failed, and washed my hands many times, and apologised even more.I've been told that the first trip you make on your own is unforgettable. Well....yeah.