Okay, I’m back. And jetlagged as hell. (Although jetlag is one of those problems that gets – and deserves – no sympathy.) But I still have a few more things to say, so I’ll do a few more travel blogs before I get back to the regular, generalized ruminations.

People have asked about the food in Japan. I love Japanese food anyway, and I have this to say: the food was universally great. We ate a lot of sushi, some of it made from fish I’d never seen before (wait until we put the fish market photos on the website!); we ate noodles, either cold with dipping sauce, or hot in a huge bowl of soup; we ate eel (at special eel restaurants!), and of course we ate famous pickles. We had breakfast sandwiches from Starbucks in Kanazawa, where “bacon” does not mean what it means here. (It’s more like fresh ham.) We also had breakfast in the Japanese manner – rice, fish, miso soup. Except at Seiichiro’s, where he fixed eggs and granola with yogurt, but then Seiichiro went to college in Georgia. I wanted to try the Korean bbq burger at the McDonald’s in Matsumoto but they were out of it so we went to a hole-in-the-wall soba joint and had buckwheat noodles cooked with scallions and dried salted sweetened fish. We had skewered roast vegetables and we had any number of odd sandwiches – the Japanese have embraced the sandwich enthusiastically, if a little off-centeredly. The weirdest thing I ate was what I was told were “the insides” of a sea cucumber, mixed with a raw egg. The sea cucumber, for those of you who don’t know about this, is not a vegetable. It lives in the ocean and it’s, well, a slug. And its insides, when mixed with a raw egg, are an acquired taste I think hell may freeze over before I acquire. But I tried it. Where I drew the line was at horsemeat and snake.

In the drink department, Japan is blanketed end-to-end with vending machines selling water, green tea in bottles, and coffee – black, or with milk, or with milk and sugar – in adorable slim cans. Mostly cold, but sometimes hot. We fed 100-yen coins into those machines for green tea and water as though we owned stock in the company (not a bad idea). It was almost always possible to get what’s called over there “English tea” (which here is called black, as opposed to green, tea), which I live on. The singular exception is the trains, where if you need caffeine, coffee is your only hope, and fairly lousy coffee at that.

I also drank Japanese beer, which is sharp and delicious, served very cold; and I learned that sake, which is always called rice wine, is actually rice beer, made the way beer is, not the way wine is, and from grain, like beer, not from fruit. The importance of this is that you can therefore drink sake during the meal when you’ve had a beer before and end up with no hangover. If, like Peter Pan, you believe.