Jeez, I remember when I started counting the days to my trip to Japan they were still over 200. Now I’m down to 60-something. Just another two months until the end of a 2-year drought. And still so much planning left to do.
I usually don’t plan things. I just live my life one day at a time, trying to make the best of it, and I have no idea what will be in a year or five years or ten years, and quite frankly I don’t give a damn. Planning that far ahead is a huge waste of time in my opinion because in the end things will turn out differently anyway and life will constantly throw things at you that you wouldn’t even dream of.
I also don’t really need to plan my trips to Japan anymore. I’ve done it so often, I practically know every streetcorner from here to Tokyo, every train station, every airport terminal, every check-in desk. And after over 100 hours of flying back and forth bewtween Europe and Japan I also know every toilet, every emergency exit and all the good and not so good seats on every possible type of aircraft. I don’t need to plan any of this. It’s like taking the bus on your way to school or work. You don’t plan that either. You just do it.
However, the reason why I still plan my trip this summer so meticulously is that it’s… fun. I love doing it. I love thinking about where to go and what to do and when to do it. From touchdown to take off I’ll spend almost exactly 170 hours on Japanese soil, and by the time I leave home at the end of July I intend to have a plan for every single minute of it. Like I said, I usually don’t plan things, but when I do I can be quite anal about it. However, not so much so when it comes to sticking to my own plan. There will always be things that happen unexpectedly and that require a change of plans. I know I’ll be meeting a couple of people while I’m in Tokyo, but I have no idea when and where that’ll be. And there will be lots of other things I cannot predict because no one can. There could be an earthquake, I could accidentally meet people I didn’t expect to meet, I could get run over by a car, things like that. But the one thing that’s definitely not gonna happen is that I find myself in Tokyo on a Wednesday morning with no idea of what to do, where to do it or how to get there. That’s why I’m gonna have a plan for the trip, something to fall back on just in case the life that’s supposed to happen doesn’t happen or turns out to be boring. And if all else fails and I need to kill an hour or two there’ll always be Johnny’s Shop to go to.
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