Cleaning out the camera...

Although I've now been home for over 2 months now, I still keep coming across little remnants of my stay overseas. For example, I cannot, for the life of me, cross any sort of crosswalk or walkway or even parking lot road without checking for cars both ways, half a dozen times. Another less traumatizing example would be my camera which I "cleaned" out the other day. I guess cleaning out is an appropriate term as my card seems to get clogged up with musty old pictures that had little to do with any file folder I would normally dump them in. So, they've been sitting, collecting dust, in the corner.

Tell me of one Westerner who has visited Asia with a camera, and I'll guarantee they'll have taken at least a picture of a toilet. This is a squatter. Good for muscle tone I've been told. I used one for about a year when I first came to Korea in 2000. Since then, the number of Western toilets has increased.

There it is, home sweet home. A sure sign of available seating.

I had an old girlfriend who used to work in an East side Mario's in Niagara falls. She told me that after large parties of Asian tourists had passed through, they would have to go into the washrooms and wash the footprints off the toilet seats. Who is grossing out whom?

Speaking of gross, this is exactly what is looks like. This picture was actually taken by my girlfriend Amity, who ordered this in a restaurant in Fukuoka, Japan. We had nothing but the pictures in the menu to guide our choices and this looked pretty good on paper. It is seared, raw chicken.

This was taken from my window the day before I left. This is what I originally expected from Asia; children practicing martial arts on roof tops, monks meditating under ice cold waterfalls, scarred burly men beheading chickens in back alley kitchens. You know, like the movies...