bloomin hell all the instructions come up in Japanese! By pure guesswork I`ve got to my blog. I`m on the 5th floor of the AER building in Sendai, well north of Tokyo, where there`s free email access. I got here by night bus from Shinjuku (modernest skyscraperish part of Tokyo) at 5.30 this morning, dossed out on the floor of the bus-station (well, I`m a great hairy Northern Barbarian, so what do you expect?) until the tourist office opened at 8.30, then got them to book me into the YH at Oku-Matsushima for the next 3 nights. I`ll be heading over there soon, want to stopover in Matsushima itself (bay of a thousand islands) to visit a Zen Temple. After a horrendous flight arrived in Narita, Tokyo international airport totally geknackered. Was sitting next to German-speaking Japanese woman who`d studied in Berne (Switzerland) - poetry, drama, writing etc (!) so had many conversations comparing Swiss, German (I lived in Germany and speak German), English and Japanese systems, or lack of them, for supporting artists and writers.

This is all very informational at the moment - give me some time to get to grips and I:ll get more poetical! The twin hammers of jetlag and culture shock def had me in their grip over the last two days! I hadn`t realised how unconsciously omnipresent our cultural reference points are, the things we orient ourselves by. I`m suddenly in an environment where I can`t relate to any of the cues. Can`t read the writing, can`t understand the language,　don`t understand what is expected and what not. Come out of Sendai Station and am confronted with a 30ft high plasma screen on an office block with 4 bears doing the tango and singing (loudly) in Japanese. I`ve no　idea where　Ｎｏｒｔｈ，　Ｓｏｕｔｈ，　Ｅａｓｔ　Ｗｅｓt are. The women are all a different shape (!) and walk entirely differently from Western women. Then, another shock is how racially homogenous Japan looks - foreigners stick out a mile. But then ... I was out shopping　in Akihabara,Tokyo, yesterday and had to wait 1/2 hr while the card transaction went thru. Got to talking with the sales assistant (who spoke excellent English) and found out he was actually Mongolian. His wife was studying in Tokyo, so he had come with her. They were from Ulan Bator. The other sales assistant was French, another was Mexican and the two cashiers were Chinese. Their common language was Japanese! I gave the Mongolian guy, who I got on very well with, my email address and invited him to Bristol and he invited me to Mongolia! There ya go...

Looks like you`re doing a great job, Margareta! I put in for postprod to Picture This (Small Wonders) - that`s what I was doing in Akihabara in that shop - buying a miniDV video camera, so been having some filmic ideas I hope to realise. Avanti!