Having "Me" Time

Christmas came and vanished in a blink of an eye.  In a couple of days it will no longer be 2011 and I am going to have to rewire my brain to write my dates with 2012 (or in the Buddhist calendar 2555).  So much has happened yet there are still so many things waiting to happen.  Who knows what the future holds? Will the year 2012 be the end of the world or will it bring with it renewed hope? I suppose we will just have to live through it to find out.   I pray though that whatever happens, it brings happiness and that at the end of it all, we can look back and appreciate the year we had. The last few days I have finally gotten into the digital book age with the initiation of my first reading of a novel on tablet.  I never thought I would. (Thank you Alex for downloading roughly 10GB worth of novels onto my tablet!)  I had always been somewhat old fashioned in my preference for paper and having documents printed out.  I like th...

After the silent Shinkansen ride where everyone was quiet, and extremely orderly, I arrived in Tokyo.  The capital of Japan, Tokyo was a completely different story from Osaka, Kyoto and Nara.  With a population of 13 million people it was bustling with people.  Everywhere I went, I was surrounded by people. At first glance of the underground map, I thought I was looking at a painting by Jackson Pollock with coloured lines and dots scattered all around the page in seemingly random patterns.  It was a piece of art in itself, but upon close study of it, you realize that there was really quite a lot of sense in all this chaos and a pattern emerged.  This combination of JR trains, Toei Line Trains, or Tokyo Metro Line allowed you to go anywhere you wanted to.  It is no wonder that Japan has one of the most extensive network of surface lines in the world. I stopped at Shinjuku station to see what this shopping area ...