On the plane on Saturday I hit the jack of my headphones with my knee, which broke the jack. I bought a jack replacement at an electronics store for 1.27, and found plenty of helpful videos on line, but this particular earbud set, SE115m, which is no longer being sold by Shure has a more confusing wiring scheme than regular headsets. So after some trial and error I figured out which wire goes where. So maybe I'll save someone else the hassle by saying Pin 1-Blue wire, Pin 2-Red wire, Pin 3-Black, Grey, Ground wire. The yellow wire I think is for the switch or mic, and doesn't seem  to need to be hooked up if you're just using it for audio.

After all these years of travelling, I finally get to Japan! I have an 11 hour layover here,  and took the chance to get out of the airport and take the train into Tokyo. Shown below is the Sensoji Temple in the Asakusa area, apparently Tokyo's oldest temple. I apologize if the image is a bit hazy, since it rained  most of  the day, and I was continually trying to keep raindrops and condensation off the camera lens. Tucked away in a corner of the temple property far from the hundreds of visitors, I found the oldest building at the Senso-ji site, and the only building with an English explanation. This almost felt like a discovery to me in the midst of all the crowds, and there was even enough space for me to set up a self-timed tripod shot.

For those who  may want to do something similar on a Narita layover, I found this relatively easy to pull off. If you do a websearch for transport from Narita to Tokyo, you  will find that the train system is described as being rather intimidating, and I would have  to agree. However, there is pretty good signage in Japanese, Korean, and English, and I found the train and airport staff to be extremely helpful in getting me pointed in the right direction, even if our ability to communicate was limited. 

At the Asakusa station in Tokyo, the station attendant knew little English, but when I said, 'Narita?', he replied, "Narita airport?" a word he appeared to have memorized precisely for this kind of situation. He then looked at his watch and said, "11:50", jumped up, escorted me to the ticket machine, and punched in the correct options. This left me with just the task of (very quickly) putting in the appropriate amount of yen--1250 by the way--an grabbing my ticket. I thought about pulling out my cell phone to check the time, but based on the station attendant's air of urgency, I figured that might waste precious seconds. I grabbed my bags, checked through the wicket, and took about a half a second to scan the signs directing me to the right platform, before I felt a train blowing into the platform below. I ran down the stairs, and there it was. Jumped on with the doors closing seconds  later. One hour, fifteen minutes later, I was  back at the airport.

The other fortunate thing is that, completely by accident, I ended  up here on a Saturday. This meant the trains were mercifully uncrowded as you can see. Quite unlike what I had envisioned.

 

By the way, it is freezing here. I've got a toque on and a fleece jacket, and I'm still cold. OK realistically it is probably about 15 degrees but I am not warm. By afternoon the toque will come off and it will be pretty pleasant, but mornings are cool this time of year here. Also, another by the way, the thing I was afraid of has happened. That is that all that smoke in the air has somehow worked  its way into my sinuses, and I feel like my head is a balloon with too much air. A lot of complaining for one blog post, I know.

If you like street food, you would enjoy the thing I went to last night which is pretty much a weekly street food festival with dozens of vendors and hundreds of hungry people wandering up and down buying satay, fried noodles, soup. This particular vendor was selling a sticky rice pastry with mung bean, toasted on charcoal grill. Very tasty, and actually reminded me of something my grandmother used to make. There was even street food sushi. Although I don't know about eating street food sushi...

One of the many plants at the centre here which is used in agroforestry, in this case a young  fan palm.  It's like a little botanical garden here.  Very beautiful. The people are very nice too. And there's wifi all the time. Not really a very challenging place at all. For me in terms of living conditions that is. A huge amount of work has gone into building and maintaining this place. I just happen to be fortunate enough  to benefit from the result.

Today was a training day on participatory methods. This is a shot from the corner of the meeting area where we held the workshop to give you an idea of how things look from where I've been standing most of the day.

I  got to the meeting and back without any further head injuries. The meeting was with a  commmunity made  up of mainly migrants from Burma who have escaped their homeland because of war and injustice, only to  find themselves  in trouble with authorities here. People have been  arrested,  ways of earning a living are few. Many find themselves in day  labour jobs on large industrial  farms spraying dangerous chemicals or otherwise working under difficult conditions. Our partner here is working with an network of  NGO's to help this community gain  some kind of stability and legal status.

We're going to  the field today so I had to set my alarm and get up at 6. So when it went off, I jumped up and said to myself, "getting up suddenly early in the morning when you're still jet-lagged, that has got to be the worst feeling in the world.

Then I turned and slammed the top of my skull into the 5 foot 6 door frame to  my bathroom.
"No," I said to myself, "that has got to be the worst feeling in the world."

This is the dry season, and people burn their fields in preparation for the planting season. So there is typically a haze over the entire area. This year apparently it is particularly bad and you can  sort of see and feel the smoke hanging  over everything. In the photo below you can make out how the  sun is heavily masked even though it is early  afternoon.

Forget practicing how to pronounce Chang Pheuk Gate. Thanks to poor weather in Toronto, and what seems to be a very chaotic system at the airport for de-icing planes, my first flight of the day ended up getting cancelled after we taxied around on the runway for about 3 hours. Very frustrating. However, thanks to my constant mantra--no checked bags--I was able to get on another flight in the afternoon to Bejing instead of Hong Kong which will put me into my final destination at almost the same time as I had orignally planned. When I went to the airline staff at the gate after all 300 frustrated passengers deplaned the first time, the staff were mainly in crowd-control mode, and not really that interested in helping me or any other individual. But when the representative I was talking to found out I had no checked luggage her facial expression went from despondent to hopeful. I mean you could literally see her thinking, "hey, I can actually help this person". She quickly directed me around the corner to another service desk out of sight of the angry mobs, and I got help and a brand new ticket within minutes. Last seat on the plane, but somehow I managed to end up not only in  my  favourite window seat, but also in an emergency exit row, with lots of leg room.

So here I am in the Bejing airport enroute. I didn't leave the airport, but I did get a country  stamp in my passport even  though I was just in transit. So this is kind of a grey area. What do you  think, can I count it as a legitmate country visit?